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WHAT OUR 
GIRLS OUGHT TO KNOW. 



MAKY J. STUDLEY, M.D., 



GRADUATE, RESIDENT PHYSICIAN, AND TEACHER OF THE NATTJRAI 
SCIENCES IN THE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, FRAMINGHAM, MASS. ; 



ALSO, 



GRADUATE OP THE WOMAN'S MEDICAL COLLEGE OP NEW YORK: DJt. 

EMILY ELACKWELL, SECRETARY OF THE FACULTY ; DR. WILLARD 

PARKER, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF EXAMINERS. 



A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, and command i 
And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light." 









NEW YORK : / ' -o* 

FUNK & WAGK 

1882. 




< 



% 



^v* 



Copyright, 
By Funk & Wagnalls, 

1882. 



AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR 

OIF 

Dr. Mary J. Studley. 



There is no study so interesting to man, as 
man; hence it is that the biographies of eminent 
men and women are more sought after than any 
other kind of literature. An interest is taken in 
them in proportion to what they have done or 
written, which have added to the world's store 
of learning, civilization and entertainment. Biog- 
raphy introduces us to all great men as friends, 
enhances our estimation of character, and trans- 
fuses the life of the departed into us. Great 
characters, like great mountains, are best seen at 
a distance ; we do not, therefore, as a general 
tiling, form a true estimate of them nntil we lose 
them. It is so with many other things. "We 
have to be deprived of them before we learn 
their value. "We see most of the bird's beauty 
when it stretches its wings for flight. 

In this brief sketch of the life of Dr. Marv 



ii Introductory. 

J. Studley we can only speak of her public char- 
acter. Like most struggling women, she had a 
side that was hidden from the world ; and there 
was, at times, a pressure upon her mind which 
none would have suspected, who only saw the 
exterior of the calm, sweet, gentle woman that 
she was. 

Dr. Studley was born in Worcester, Massa- 
chussetts, about the year 1835. She was the 
daughter of parents who were able to give her 
more advantages in early life than commonly fall 
to the lot of young women. She was educated 
at Newton, in her native State, and early de- 
veloped a thirst for those branches of education 
which most girls pass over. She acquired a 
thorough knowledge of Latin, mathematics, nat- 
ural history and physiology, to which, later on, 
she added the German and French languages — in 
the first of which she could speak and write with 
great fluency. No State has furnished so many 
female teachers as Massachusetts; and, being 
full of ambition and independence, she enlisted 
in that high and honorable calling, locating her- 
self at Sandusky, Ohio, where she proved her 
stability, worthiness and fidelity, by remaining 
there twelve years — all the time engaged in the 
education of youth. At the end of this time 
family inducements brought her to New York, 
where she lived four and a half years in the 



hitroductory . iii 

family of her brother. It was about this time 
that she resolved to study medicine and become 
a physician. With her to resolve was to do ; and 
at once she entered the Woman's Medical Col- 
lege of the New York Infirmary, and took a full 
course, graduating with honor. The first experi- 
ence of Dr. Studley as a physician was at Eliza- 
beth, New Jersey. She went there, if not abso- 
lutely a stranger, still without the assistance so 
essential to new beginners in the profession. It 
was with her an experiment, and her hopes came 
from confidence in herself — her splendid health 
and buoyant spirits. She had to contend with 
ignorance, apathy, and settled physicians of ex- 
perience and skill, who, like most practitioners 
in medicine, were jealous of and unfriendly to 
new comers — especially towards a woman, un- 
known, unheralded and but newly graduated. 

A young lawyer advertises himself, and waits 
long for a first client, bu-t what is that to a woman 
with the popular prejudice against her sex, and 
with questions of life and death to be submitted to 
her skill? Dr. Studley, with womanly trust, put 
a modest card in the papers, placed her sign upon 
the house, and waited for her first patient. It 
may be readily believed that she had abundant 
leisure ; but, she did not waste her time. As we 
have seen she had obtained much and varied 
learning, and she had withal a vigorous and 



iv Introductory. 

versatile pen. Her strength was in her clear- 
headed, common-sense, and the gift of expressing 
her thoughts in good English, never saying too 
much or too little. "With a wise calculation of 
the charms of attracting popular attention she 
resolved to lecture on the subject of physiology, 
first delivering a few lectures to a promiscuous 
audience, and then a course exclusively to ladies. 
Her first lecture was delivered to between fifty 
and a hundred curious listeners ; with whatever 
feelings they came, they went away satisfied that 
she knew how to treat her subject with masterly 
skill. Her experiment as a lecturer was success- 
ful and satisfactory. If patients came in slowly, 
they did come ; so that by the end of the first 
year Dr. Studley was a self-supporting woman, 
with the prospect of a fair share of the practice 
of the city. 

More than fifteen years of teaching, however, 
had formed habits which could not be wholly 
overcome; and although she labored zealously in 
her own profession, there was always an under- 
current of longing for the teachers desk and in- 
quiring students. A quiet city like Elizabeth did 
not satisfy her ambition ; and after a residence of 
about two years she left it and located in New 
York city, where every thing had to be begun 
anew. She met difficulties and obstacles with 
womanly determination, lecturing as before and 



Introductory. v 

using all legitimate means to achieve success; 
but Providence had decreed that she should oc- 
cupy a wider and more congenial field of useful- 
ness. Taking better counsel than that which 
carried her to New York, she returned to Massa- 
chusetts, and for a while practised medicine in 
her native city, Worcester, where she had many 
friends who gladly welcomed her home. She next 
was offered and accepted a position in the State 
Normal School, at Framingham, as Professor of 
the Natural Sciences, and as Resident physician. 
Here, she was indeed at home. Her studies in 
medicine had not been lost ; they had rounded out 
her talents as a teacher, they had widened her 
knowledge of human nature, and all her faculties 
were fully developed. This was, undoubtedly, 
the Summer period of her life. She was to her 
scholars, what Mentor was to Telemachus — a 
guide, a counsellor and a friend — and they loved 
her as such. 

Twice she visited Europe, each time in com- 
pany of a party of young and eager travelers and 
students, and furnished some interesting letters 
to the Newark Advertiser, giving graphic ac- 
counts of their travels. Prom her last trip she 
returned with somewhat impared health, the re- 
sult of over-fatigue and anxiety, from which she 
never fully recovered. She became nervous and 
restless ; and some action on the part of the man- 



vi Introductory. 

agers of the Normal School, of which she did 
not approve, led to her resignation, and tem- 
porary loss of employment. Unwilling to return 
to the practice of medicine she finally opened a 
private school in Framingham, which opened with 
every promise of success and abundant returns in 
reputation and money. But, alas ! a cloud may 
suddenly obscure the brightest sky ; so it some- 
times happens, that what seems to be the horn* of 
triumph becomes the horn* of affliction. 

' c Death, comes to all, his cold and sapless hand 
Waves o'er the world, and beckons us away. 
Who shall resist the summons ? " 

The strain upon the great heart of the strong 
woman had been too long endured ; the fatigue of 
body and mind had been excessive ; and even as a 
host of loving friends and relatives were rejoic- 
ing over the new departure, and eager scholars 
were waiting her words of wisdom and sympathy, 
the Angel of Death claimed her as his own. 
There was but a momentary struggle, the light 
fled from the eyes, the firm lips closed, and the 
spirit of Mary J. Studley was before the throne 
of the Creator. 

In character, Dr. Studley mingled strength 
and tenderness. She was fearless in the dis- 
charge of her duty, and her life was full of heroic 
self-sacrifice, and rich in noble deeds. In her 
off-hand talks to her scholars or assemblies, she 



Introductory. vii 

would draw upon her exhaustless fund of humor, 
creating ripples of laughter ; and with the door 
thus opened, and the attention gained, she would 
crowd into their minds a wonderful amount of 
information. She had a large head, a round face, 
with honesty written in every line of it, and bright 
sparkling eyes, with a sweet clear voice. She 
was warm in her friendships, and loved the so- 
ciety of intelligent people. If she had her fail- 
ings, which is not improbable, she had a wonder- 
ful way of hiding them from all but herself and 
her God. 

- As a writer, this little volume is a fan* ex- 
ample of her style and versatile powers. Her 
love for the } 7 oung was great, and she had a 
strong desire to contribute all in her power to the 
mental and physical developement of her own 
sex. This volume will be found to contain a 
large store of illustration and information, show 
ing the extensive and varied character of her own 
studies. Dr. Studley has left other manuscripts 
behind her which deserve to, and which we trust 
may, some day, be permitted to reach the public. 

J. K. HOYT. 
June 1, 1882, Newark, K J. 



PREFACE. 

Said Confucius : "If I am building a 
mountain, and stop before the last basketful 
of earth is placed on the summit, I have failed 
of my work. But if I have placed but one 
basketful on the plain, and go on, I am really 
building a mountain." 

This is my little basketful of earth which 
I bring to the ever-growing mountain of liter- 
ature upon education. " There cannot be, on 
such an inexhaustible subject, one book too 
much, even after the best — except the worst." 

In my basketful you will find some grains 
of simple truth which I have picked up " along 
the shore of the great ocean." I have set 
them among gems from Homer, from Moses, 

from Solomon, from Plato, from Jesus, and 

ix 



x Preface. 

from many modern poets, philosophers, and 
teachers, and now they are yours, dear girls, 
for whom tbey have been collected, May 
they help you " to do and to become your 

best " ! 

11. J. S. 
State Normal School, 
Framingham, Mass., Jan,, 1878. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface '. „ iii 

Introductory. 5 

CHAPTER I. 
"Study God's Poem" . .. a 12 

CHAPTER II. 
"Know Thyself 5 ' 26 

CHAPTER III. 

What Shall We Eat, and How Shall We 

Cook It ? 42 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Heart 54 

CHAPTER V. 
How We Breathe GS 

CHAPTER VI. 

How We Breathe. — Continued 81 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Brain and Nerves 97 

xi 



xii Contents. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Nerves and Nervousness 113 

CHAPTER IX. 

How Plants and Animals Are Perpetuated... 134 

CHAPTER X. 

How to Become Beautiful 146 

CHAPTER XL 

The Uses and Abuses of Dress 171 

CHAPTER XII. 

The Mate and the Home 199 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The Perfect Woman 225 

Index 257 



Wbfat Otif $iA$ Ou^t to Know. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

As vigorous health, and its accompanying high spir- 
its, are larger elements of happiness than any other 
things whatever, the teaching how to maintain them 
is a teaching that yields to no other whatever. — Her- 
bert Spencer. 

Having been privileged, for a number of 
years, to associate with " our girls " in schools 
both public and private, as a teacher of the laws 
of health, there have come to me from time 
to time not a few requests, both from mothers 
and daughters, for a printed manual of the 
lessons given in this capacity. These requests 
have led me to believe that there is room for 
such a book among the many which seek to 
make our young women wiser and better. 



6 Introductory. 

The higher education of " our girls " is the 
prominent topic of the day in the press, in the 
magazine, in the parlor, and on the platform. 
New colleges are springing np for them, and 
old ones are gradually opening their doors to 
them. The nineteenth century is coming to 
recognize the meaning of what Moses told the 
world so long ago, when lie said God put Eve 
beside Adam, instead of putting her above him 
or below him, or into a "female seminary" all 
to herself ; and along with this recognition goes 
the underlying one that a sickly Eve was no 
more a part of the Divine plan than was a 
sickly Adam. The record is emphatic and 
clean upon this point. Sublime in its simple 
eloquence as is the character of Moses himself, 
the narrative says, " And God saw everything 
Jiat he had made, and, behold, it was very 
good"; but in the years that roll between then 
and now it appears that there has been a deal 
of interference with the original " very good " 
work, until it would hardly seem as if God 
could recognize his pattern in the sickly, feeble, 
nervous, jaded, hysterical, worry -faced, and 
wasp-waisted creature who spends half her time 



Introductory. 7 

in telling her aches and the other half in the 
specialist's office. 

It is not strange that tin's creature should 
have been refused admission to colleges whose 
work is planned for sound minds in sound bod- 
ies, nor that the world should be slow to be- 
lieve that she is capable of doing this work ; but 
it happens that, along with the movement to 
ward higher intellectual culture, there is a no 
less vigorous campaign in behalf of the temple 
which the soul inhabits, that it may become fit 
for the Holy Ghost's indwelling If Eve is 
going to stand beside Adam, where God put 
her, she must take such care of her body as to 
insure its being a help rather than a hindrance 
to her work; and it has been a constant joy 
during my association with school-girls, in the 
capacity already named, to find a growing senti- 
ment in favor of that vigorous health which 
is the prime factor of success in life. 

It has long been said by prominent medical 
men that women themselves are responsible 
for a large share of their characteristic weak- 
nesses, and the following extract from a note 
addressed to me by Dr. Willard Parker only 
echoes the prevailing sentiment of the profes- 



8 Introductory. 

sion. He says : " Women kill themselves bj 
their bad management in a mechanical way. 
They make themselves portable machines for 
effete matter. Their nerves cry out when fed 
by a dirty blood, and the cry is called neural- 
gia. What folly to give an anodyne for the 
neuralgia and let the cause of it remain !" 

It is not strange that the gentlemen of 
the profession were limited to generalities in 
their charges against women for maltreatment 
of their bodies. They never wore the absurd 
machinery with which the conventionally-dressed 
woman is deformed, and how could they attack 
its details or make any real progress toward 
reform ! The real dress - reform necessarily 
waited to be inaugurated by medical women, 
and its progress keeps pace with theirs toward 
popular acceptance. No woman who under- 
stands the beauty of the original design of the 
human body will ever seek to distort that 
body by subjecting it to the demands of a 
fashion which is totally regardless of natural 
laws; it therefore follows, as surely as day 
follows night, that the women who study med- 
icine are the women who have most respect 
for their bodies, and who have, therefore, the 



Introductory. 

soundest and most serviceable bodies — bodies 
upon which they can count for any amount 
of intellectual or other work as surely as men 
can depend upon their bodies. * 

Says the Rev. Charles Kingsley in his ex- 
cellent book on "Health and Education": 
" Let women who have studied medicine teach 
to other women what every woman ought to 
know." And long before he said it they were 
in the field, ready and anxious to carry the 
gospel of health to their misguided and suffer- 
ing sisters. Having learned what is causing 
so much misery among them, they find it diffi- 
cult to wait in the office for the mischief to 
be done which they know is so much more 
easily prevented than cured ; hence they go 
forth to the school and the lecture-room as 
missionaries and ministers of the goddess Hy- 
geia, the fair daughter who put more faith in 
correct living than in the charmed serpents of 
her father ^Esculapius. 

" The laws of health are the laws of Grod, 
and are as binding as the decalogue," is an 
oft-quoted saying of Dr. Parker's. We take 
great care to teach the decalogue to our young 
men and maidens; but are we just to them 



10 Introductory. 

when we neglect to teach them what they 
ought to know about their bodies, in order 
that they may obey the laws of those bodies ? 

My experience with "our girls" convinces 
me that they do not willfully sin against their 
bodies, but that they are sadly ignorant of 
the laws which govern them. We all admit 
that it is the mother's duty to acquaint them 
with these laws ; but it is a lamentable fact 
that the present generation of mothers is wo- 
fully deficient in the ability to do so. They 
admit it, and are, as a rule, glad to secure 
the aid of an educated lady physician in sup- 
plementing their home work. 

And so, dear girls, we come to you, glad 
to help your mothers teach you what you 
ought to know. It is the expression of the 
highest thought of God, this temple which we 
inhabit ! 

Plato said to his pupils: " You take a jour- 
ney to Olympia to behold the work of Phidias, 
and each of you thinks it a misfortune to die 
without a knowledge of such things; and will 
you have no inclination to see and understand 
those works for which there is no need to take 
a journey, but which are ready and at hand, 



Introductory. 1 1 

even to those who bestow no pains ! Will 
you never perceive what you are, or for what 
you are born, or for what purpose you are 
admitted to behold this spectacle !" 

" Phidias worked on marble, and the light 
of his creation, still beams from afar. Raphael 
worked on canvas, and gave to the world a 
beauty which has thrilled hearts through all 
these ages. What shall we iashion, who work 
upon the breath of God I" 



CHAPTER I. 

"STUDY GOD'S POEM." 

11 Thou need'st but eyes rightly to see his work, 
A soul, a soul to understand it all, 
A heart to feel it simply as it is: 
How will the loving soul thrill through thee then, 
Which he has breathed into the eternal work, 
Into the beauteous face of man and flowers ! 

It becometh man to understand 

What God doth speak out loudly through his works." 

— Leopold Schefer. 
" And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." 

— Moses. 

You can find this " dust of the earth" very 
easily by putting any bone into the lire long 
enough for its animal matter to be separated 
from its earthy constituents, and then your 



" Study God's Poem:' 13 

knowledge of chemistry and mineralogy will 
tell you that the dust into which the bone 
resolves itself is just the same dust which goes 
to make the marble of the Yenus de Milo, 
the coral which you wear over your heart, 
the jewel which sparkles on your finger, or 
your plaster cast of Psyche. 

I once had a little black girl in a Sunday- 
school, w T ho, in reply to the question, " Of 
what are you made ?" said, " Mud, ma'am." 
And she was no less accurate than Moses ; for 
you know you have learned that three-fourths 
of your body consist of water, and we all know 
that dust and water make mud. And do you 
know what becomes of the dust which remains 
when the bone is burned ? Some of this 
" dust " is called phosphate of lime, and the 
farmers put it on the fields, that you may get 
it for your own bones in the form of corn 
and beans and wheat, while the match-makers 
(I mean Lucifer matches) also take a share 
of it to use in their factories. It is said that 
each one of us carries about in her skeleton 
enough phosphorus, in the form of phosphate 
of lime, to make four thousand matches. 

Other portions of the "dust" which com- 



14 "Study (rod's Poem," 

poses the bones are called carbonate of lime; 
and when we have spent " our years as a tale 
that is told," it is quite possible that this dust 
of ours may reappear as a handsome coral 
spray to adorn the maidens who shall come 
after us. Besides the phosphate and carbonate 
of lime, there is a bit of fluoride of lime in 
our bones, and this may have existed in some 
gem which has sparkled in the crown of an 
emperor, so wisely does Dame Nature econ- 
omise her resources. She has, as you know, 
but sixty-three elements to work with, and she 
has to turn and twist and hash and warm over 
her odds and ends, over and over and over 
again, in order to keep all her ovens supplied. 
These, then, are the main elements which go to 
make the dust of your bones — phosphate, car- 
bonate and fluoride of lime — and the bones of 
your pet kitten are made of the same sub- 
stances. Not only this, but she has ab< ut the 
same number of bones that you have, for is 
she not a first-class creature, a vertebrate ? Do 
you know how a vertebra looks ? If not, let 
me beg you to go to the meat market at once 
and learn just how that column of little bones 
looks of which your " spine " consists. Look, 



"Study God's Poem:' 15 

too, at the nice little cushions between the ver- 
tebrae by which all the vertebrates except the 
poor turtle and the corseted woman secure 
such flexibility of the spinal column as consti- 
tutes the grace of motion. 

Have you seen the inner surface of a turtle's 
back, and how all the vertebrae are consolidated 
so that the creature can no more execute a 
graceful movement than you could if you had to 
carry your house on your back ? Mythology 
tells us that the turtle alone of all the animals 
refused to attend the wedding of Jupiter and 
Juno, and that for this slight the latter con- 
demned her to forever carry her house on her 
back. I wonder what offense those women are 
expiating who hold their vertebrae in the man- 
ner of the turtle by means of " 6tays ? " It 
hardly seems possible that any animal would 
voluntarily put itself under such restraint. 

Have you ever observed the beautiful adapt- 
ations of the parts of the skeleton of a verte- 
brate to each other and to their uses 1 If not, 
let me ask you to go to a Natural History mu- 
seum at your earliest opportunity, and see what 
a superb specimen of architecture is presented 
by this array of bones. 



16 "Study God's Poem." 

Observe the skull or brain case; if possible, 
the human skull, since that is the finest of all. 
How perfect the arch of the dome ! How firm, 
and yet how fine, the sutures or seams where 
the separate bones unite ! How strong and able 
to resist the shock of falls is the occiput, or 
backbone ! Compare its thickness with that of 
the bones which form the eye-sockets, and see 
with what nicety the requisite strength is secured 
at this point by thin bones, which are almost 
transparent, and have no need to be thick to 
resist shocks such as the back of the skull is 
liable to receive. Look then into the nostrils, 
and see those 'fine and beautifully twisted bones 
which are so nicely adapted to increasing the 
space over which the air has to pass on its way 
to the lungs, that it may be warmed and fitted 
for introduction into such choice company as the 
air-cells of the lungs afford. Not only this, but 
also an increase of space for the distribution of 
the nerve of smell is secured. The longer the 
dog's nose and the more twisted these turbina- 
ted bones, as they are called, the keener 'is his 
sense of smell. And why not for you ? The 
nez retrousse may possibly add to the saucy 
prettiness of the face which it matches, but for 



"Study God's Poem:' 17 

real service and as a mark of high breeding the 
aquiline and the Roman noses can hardly be 
excelled. A strongly - built nose and a chin 
which does not retreat as if anxious to get out 
of sight are proofs of a well-built skeleton. 

The houses built with hands soon fall into 
hopeless ruin if the frames be of poor timber, 
poorly jointed, and the same is true of the house 
each of us lives in and which Paul asks us to 
call a temple for the Holy Ghost's indwelling. 
I don't believe the Holy Ghost will ever make 
his home in a poorly-built house. He may 
make it occasional missionary visit?, and then 
the soul may shine out of it with a luster which 
is truly surprising ; but he doesn't, as a rule, 
take up his abode there. Infinitely better than 
an inheritance of bank stock with a poor house- 
frame is a well-built house without the bank 
stock, for if our parents give us the latter we 
can know the luxury of winning our own dollars 
and spending them, too ; while in the former 
case we can only lie about in helpless impo- 
tence and see our bank stock going to enrich 
the doctors. Says Mr. John Burroughs : " I 
notice that when a family begins to run out, it 
turns out its toes, drops off at the heel, shortens 



18 "Studij God's Poem?' 

its jaw and dotes on small feet and hands." 
What's to hinder a structure from going to 
ruin when the corner-stones give way ! 

Look now at the thorax or chest. See what 
a perfect cage it is for the protection of its 
occupants, and how light and airy it is at the 
same time. Strength joined with lightness and 
elasticity sufficient for perfect freedom of mo- 
tion of all its parts. See how beautifully the 
round head of each rib fits into the little socket 
prepared for it, and which in life is so nicely 
lubricated that the constant motion of each head 
in its socket is unnoticed, although each rib 
rises and falls with every breath ; that is, when 
it is not held in splints by that instrument of 
torture which one sees in all the shop - windows, 
labeled " Patent glove-fitting," a machine which 
has been the cause of more misery to women 
than any other one thing. I sometimes think 
that Moses' account of Eve's eating the fatal 
apple and then running for a fig-leaf refers to 
her putting on a corset and the abominations 
which hang thereby. 

Believe me, dear girls, you cannot compress 
the walls of this delicate cage without paying 
the penalty in ways which you would never 



"Study God's Poem:' 19 

suspect. The corner-stone of a house may 
crumble away and never be noticed till the 
tower falls over, and so you may undermine 
your foundation by crowding your chest bones 
upon each other, and the head alone will utter 
its protest by aching. That is the tower falling 
over. 

Look now at the complexity of the frame- 
work of the wrists and the ankles, the hands 
and the feet. Note that it takes eight little 
bones in the wrist, all of them so adjusted and 
lubricated as to move upon each other in most 
exquisite nicety, so that the movements of the 
human hand have no parallel in the universe 
for beauty and variety. What do you suppose 
the Author of all this mechanism thinks when 
he sees a string of bangles hung on it ! 

Look at the foot with its marvelous array 
of bones, all adapted for motion by the most 
perfect system of joints which could possibly be 
made, and tell me what the maker of it must 
think when he sees that complex and beautiful 
instep tipped wholly out of its position on a 
French heel, and those toes folded upon each 
other in helpless inactivity, not one of them able 



20 "Study God's Poem." 

to move itself or assert its " inalienable right to 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

Says Mr. John Burroughs in his charming 
little book, " Winter Sunshine," which I hope 
you all have read or will read, " Occasionally on 
the sidewalk, amid the dapper, swiftly-moving, 
high-heeled boots and gaiters, I catch a glimpse 
of the naked human foot. Nimbly it scuffs 
along : the toes spread, the sides flatten, the 
heel protrudes ; it grasps the curbing, or bends 
to the form of the uneven surfaces — a thing 
sensuous and alive, that seems to take cogniz- 
ance of whatever it touches or passes. How 
primitive and uncivil it looks in such company — 
a real barbarian in the parlor ! We are so 
unused to the human anatomy, to simple, un- 
adorned nature, that it looks a little repulsive ; 
but it is beautiful for all that. . . . That unham- 
pered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is the 
type of the pedestrian ; man returned to first 
principles, in direct contact and intercourse 
with the earth and the elements ; his faculties 
unsheathed, his mind plastic, his body tough 
ened, his heart light, his soul dilated ; while 
those cramped and distorted members in the 
calf and kid are the unfortunate wretches 



"Study God's Poem." 21 

doomed to carriages and cushions. ... I fear the 
American is becoming disqualified for the manly 
art of walking by a falling off in the size of 
his foot. ...A small, trim foot, well booted or 
gaitered, is the national vanity. How we stare 
at the big feet of foreigners, and wonder what 
may be the price of leather in those countries, 
and where all the aristocratic blood is, that 
these plebeian extremities so predominate. If 
we were admitted to the confidences of the 
shoemaker to Her Majesty or to His Royal 
Highness, no doubt we would modify our views 
on this latter point, for a truly large and royal 
nature is never stunted in the extremities ; a 
little foot never yet supported a great char- 
acter. 

" It is said that Englishmen, when they 
first come to this country, are for some time 
under the impression that American women all 
have deformed feet, they are so coy of them 
and so studiously careful to keep them hid." 

Indeed, it seems to me that many of us 
spend our lives in trying to convince our Maker 
that he doesn't understand his business. We are 
averse to the study of his plan of action, and, 
instead of taking the body as he gives it to us, 



22 "Study God's PoemP 

and trying to make it conform to his laws, we 
squeeze it and bind it and tilt it from its 
erectness, until we are mere caricatures of the 
Eve whom we pretend to admire in the pictures 
and statues, but whom we utterly refuse to 
imitate. 

Believe me, dear girls, God knows best 
how to shape the framework of your soul's 
habitation so that the light of a healthy, free 
and happy life shall shine out from its walls 
and through its windows. Do not, I pray you, 
distort and fetter it into total deformity, but 
rather seek to glorify him who made you by 
becoming gloriously strong. 

Mr. Emerson, in his essay on "Beauty," 
tells us " it is the soundness of the bones that 
ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion; 
health of constitution that makes the sparkle 
and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjust- 
ment of the size and of the joining of the 
sockets of the skeleton that gives grace of out- 
line and the finer grace of movement. The 
cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. 
The dancing-master can never teach a badly- 
built man to walk well. The tint of the flower 
proceeds from its root, and the lusters of the 



"Study God's Poem?' 23 

sea-shell begin with its existence. . . . The felici- 
ties of design in art or in works of nature are 
shadows or forerunners of that beauty which 
reaches its perfection in the human form. All 
men are its lovers. Wherever it goes it creates 
joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted 
to it. It reaches its height in woman. < To 
Eve/ say ihe Mahometans, ' God gave two- 
thirds of all beauty.' A beautiful woman is a 
practical poet, taming her savage mate, plant- 
ing tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom 
she approaches." 

And each one of you has the right to be 
perfectly beautiful by so living that you shall 
be perfectly healthy. The transient beauty of 
the hectic flush and the brilliant eye of the 
dying consumptive are akin to the ephemeral 
brilliancy of the autumnal foliage, but it is the 
final flicker of the candle which precedes its 
extinction. 

To be truly beautiful, with the unfading 
beauty of health and culture of mind and soul 
which good health make possible, is to grow 
beautiful as long as you live. What could be 
finer in the way of a beautiful face than the 
pictures give us of Martha Washington in her 



24 "Study God's Poem." 

post-meridian ripeness ! Yet how rarely one 
sees so handsome a face past the age of fifty ! 
It is the exception where it ought to be the 
rule, and the reason why it is the exception is, 
because young women have learned so little 
up to the present time of natural ways of liv- 
ing. 

It seems to be characteristic of the reason- 
ing animal to err, while the ones who depend 
upon instinct are pretty sure to go right. 

" But,'' I hear you ask, " supposing we be- 
gin life with sickly bodies, as a direct inherit- 
ance from sickly parents. What if our bones 
are already deformed by rickets, because our 
fathers and mothers had rickety skeletons, or 
because they fed us in such wrong ways in 
our infancy as to make ours so ?" Then, I say, 
go to work and learn what it is which makes 
rickety bones, and supply those defects in 
your early diet which have resulted in such 
deformities. Enough has been written upon 
this subject to eradicate rickety skeletons from 
the whole human family, if they would but 
read and heed. 

But, above all things else, if you are one 
of those unhappy ones whose inheritance is a 



"Study God's Poem:' 25 

frail body which, no amount of hygienic care 
can make sound, I pray you think well before 
you venture to transmit your frailties to inno- 
cent children who ought never to be born. 
Rather be content to live and die an " old 
maid," and so a heroine. 



CHAPTEE II. 

"KNOW THYSELF." 

The beautiful youth Charmides, who is also 
the most temperate of mortals, is asked by 
Socrates, "What is Temperance?" He answers 
(1), " Quietness." " But temperance is a fine 
and noble thing; and quietness, in many or 
most cases, is not so fine a thing as quick- 
ness." He tries again, and says (2) that tem- 
perance is modesty. But this, again, is set 
aside by a sophistical application of Homer: 
for temperance is good, as well as noble, and 
Homer has declared that " modesty is not good 
for a needy man." (3), Once more Charmides 
makes the attempt. This time he gives a defi- 
nition which he has heard, and of which lie 
insinuates that Critias is the author : " Temper- 



"Know Thyself :' 27 

ance is doing one's own business." But the 
artisan who makes another man's shoes may 
be temperate, and jet he is not doing his own 
business. How is this riddle to be explained ? 
. . . Critias, in the spirit of Socrates and of 
Greek life generally, proposes as a fifth defi- 
nition, Temperance is self-knowledge. But all 
sciences have a subject: number is the subject 
of arithmetic, health of medicine : what is the 
subject of temperance or wisdom ? The answer 
is, that (6) Temperance is the knowledge of 
what a man knows, and of what he does not 
know. ... 

In this dialogue may be noted the Greek 
ideal of beauty and goodness, the vision of 
the fair sonl in the fair body, realized in the 
beautiful Charmides. — Jowetfs Dialogues of 
Plato. 

Although Plato, in this dialogue, gives no 
abstract definition of temperance, it is yet 
plain that he includes self-knowledge as a 
prime constituent of that virtue. Another 
writer says, "Nearly all the evils in life come 
to us from a want of self-domination," and I 
am sure you will all agree with both of them. 



28 "Know Thyself." 

Let us therefore go on to study ourselves, 
that we may know how to manage ourselves. 

You have learned, in the foregoing chap- 
ter, that a variety of elements enter into the 
composition of the framework of your bodies, 
and that the various parts of that framework 
are most nicely adapted to eacli other and to 
their respective offices. Your own observation 
shows yon that this bony framework is clothed 
with a covering of soft tissues, and you also 
are conscious that a certain number of organs 
reside in its cavities. These organs you are 
accustomed to call vital organs, and you are 
aware that all your powers of thought and 
action depend upon their, harmony of action. 
That constitutes health. All sickness is dis- 
cord. 

Let us now go on to study in detail the 
provision made by the Author of all this 
mechanism for maintaining both its vitality 
and its harmony. We will begin, if you 
please, with the provisions for digestion in the 
simplest forms of animal life, and glance at 
the beautiful gradations by which we arrive at 
the most complex apparatus, as it exists in 
our bodies, by which the constant wear of all 



"Know Thyself r 29 

animal organisms is made good, and life and 
growth maintained. 

The general name Protozoa, meaning first 
animals, is applied to a large number of very 
small, simple, aquatic creatures, too small to 
be seen by the naked eye, and only visible 
by aid of the microscope. These little crea- 
tures are mere dots of jelly-like tissue, desti- 
tute of any apparatus for taking in or digesting 
food, beyond a set of delicate fringes, called 
cilia ) meaning eye-lashes, whose office is to 
float little particles of food toward them as 
they swim about in the water. They are not 
only mouthless, but headless, and one part of 
their body is just as capable of eating as an- 
other. They may be said to get around their 
food. A very easy way of living, you see, to 
float around in the water and live on what 
happens to stick to you, without even the 
trouble of swallowing. The next sub-kingdom 
includes all the radiated animals, such as star- 
fishes, sea-urchins, sea -cucumbers, etc. You 
can pick up great numbers of star-fishes on 
the rocks by the seashore at low tide, and if 
you look carefully in little pools and crevices 
between the rocks you may find something 



30 "Know Thyself." 

that looks like a chestnut-burr. That is a sea- 
urchin, or echinus. Then, if you look at the 
under surface of the star-fish, you will find a 
round hole in the center of hi in. That is his 
mouth, and quite likely his stomach will be in 
his mouth, turned wrong side out, as that is a 
way he has of doing. He is very fond of oys- 
ters, raw. He takes one in his arms, shell 
and all, and thrusts his stomach in the cleft of 
the valves and sucks out his victim alive. This, 
you see, is quite an advance upon the proto- 
zoan style of eating; but when you look at 
the under surface of the sea-urchin you will 
find a surprising improvement upon the star- 
fish, in that he has a whole set of teeth. Not 
only this, but he is, in one sense, ahead of you 
in the dental business, in that he lias five jaws, 
while you have but two, and each jaw has its 
own tooth all to itself. 

The next sub -kingdom includes the Jlol- 
lusks, or soft-bodied animals like snails, oysters 
and clams, who live in shells and cany their 
houses wherever they go, always having their 
trunks packed and ready for a move. If you 
take a clam from his house before lie is cooked, 
and look carefully at that edge of him which 



"Know Thy self r 31 

was under the hinge, and at that end of him 
which is opposite his siphon (that is, the tube 
which is often called his neck, but it isn't his 
neck at all, because it isn't in the right place 
lor a neck, and because he hasn't any neck, 
either), you will find a hole with two pairs of 
feelers to it. That is his mouth, and the feelers 
are his lips. They are very long for lips, but 
they have to serve for lips and tongue, too. 
He has no teeth, and his mouth opens right 
into his stomach, in the handiest way possible. 
Taken as a whole, he is considerably more 
highly organized than the people already spoken 
of, even though the sea-urchin is ahead of him 
in dentistry. But there's a fellow in his kingdom 
who is considerably ahead of him, even, and that 
is the snail. If you have never made the ac- 
quaintance of the sea-snail, let me beg you to 
do so at your earliest convenience. You can 
easily find him in the mud at low tide. Put 
him in a pan of sea- water, and see him prome- 
nade ! Look at the size of his foot, and when 
you have drawn his portrait alive, en prome- 
nade, drop him in alcohol, leave him there a 
few hours in his last sleep, and then hunt for 
his tongue. This is the greatest marvel in the 



32 "Know Thyself." 

way of dentistrj' which has yet appeared. It 
is all covered with teeth. Only think how con- 
venient ! You will find clam and mussel shells 
on the shore, with little round holes in them 
which the snail has gnawed with this wonder- 
ful tonguo of his. That's the way he gets his 
clams and mussels for his dinner. 

The next sub-kingdom includes the articu- 
lated or jointed people, like lobsters, crabs, spi- 
ders and insects. They carry their skeletons 
on the outside, instead of inside, and move 
their jaws from side to side, instead of up 
and down. Their entire eating apparatus is 
very much more complex than that of any 
of the people previously spoken of, and they 
are considered " pretty well up in the world," 
as the saying is. The insects are very airy 
people after they get their wings. While they 
are in the larval stage they are very voracious, 
and keep their jaws going most of the time. 
These jaws are so hard and horny that they 
make quite a loud noise when they move, some 
of them ; but after they evolve from the 
larval to the winged state they are much 
more dainty, and their side-moving jaws are 
replaced generally by a long, sucking tube, 



"Know Thyself." 33 

which they plunge into the flower-cups for the 
nectar which they have scented from afar. 

Last of all come the vertebrates, and that is 
where you and I come in. We all of us, from 
the fishes to you and me, except the turtle, 
have our skeletons out of sight, and we all 
move our jaws up and down instead of from 
side to side. More than this, we have a most 
elaborate set of tools with which to do our 
eating and digesting. See what an array of 
them is found in the mouths of all the higher 
vertebrates ! Note the delicacy of the lips in 
the horse, for instance. The finest velvet can- 
not compare with them in softness, and so 
keen is their perceptive sense that not one 
offending substance is allowed to pass them. 
If our lips did such faithful service for us, we 
should be spared a large proportion of the ills 
from which we suffer. 

Look now at your own teeth ! What vari- 
ety of form, and what nicety of adaptation, do 
you find ! The front ones for cutters, the next 
ones for tearers, and the back ones for grind- 
ers ! And then the tongue! "A little mem- 
ber," to be sure, "but it boasteth great things, 5 ' 
and well it may, for we should have a hard 



34 "Know Thyself." 

time without it. But the most elaborate appa- 
ratus in the mouth is the glandular, by which 
no less than four different kinds of saliva are 
supplied for moisteniug the food and fitting it 
for conveyance to the stomach. No less than 
two or three pounds a day of this fluid are 
prepared by a mouth which only chews the 
necessary quantity and quality of food, while 
the mouths that are forever chewing gum, or 
peanuts, or slippery-elm, or tobacco, or any 
superfluous substance, prepare very much more ; 
for as the blood has to supply the materials 
for this excess, for which there is no provision 
in the original plan, it thereby becomes very 
much impoverished. By and by the results of 
this impoverishment begin to appear in the 
way of a thirst which calls for rum if it's a 
tobacco-chewing boy, and for tea if its a guin- 
chewinggirl; and that's the way a good many 
forms of intemperance begin. The beautiful 
youth Charmides, with the fair soul in the fair 
body, was no chewer of tobacco ; and Minerva, 
the beautiful goddess, was no tea-drinker, for 
no tea-drinker ever had the elegant repose and 
dignity which belong to her. 

But the main point to which I would espe- 



"Know Thyself:' 35 

dally call your attention is the pains displayed 
for moistening the food without any help from 
without. If the Divine Architect of this temple 
in which we dwell has taken such infinite 
care, proceeding by these nice gradations from 
the polyp to the vertebrate, to supply our 
mouths with thirty-two teeth for chewing, and 
four kinds of saliva for wetting, the food we 
need, are we not committiDg a positive sin 
when we descend to the level of the alligator 
by tossing the food past the teeth as soon as 
they have grasped it, and sending it swim- 
ming in ice-water down to the stomach ? 

It is no less true of the work of digestion 
than it is of every other work, that the final 
success depends upon the thorough perform- 
ance of the preliminary work, and you may 
be very sure of life-long immunity from dys- 
pepsia if, having secured the right kind of 
food, you carefully follow Nature's plan for 
the preparatory work of the mouth ; while you 
may be equally sure of becoming a confirmed 
dyspeptic, when you ought to be in your prime, 
if you neglect to use your teeth faithfully on 
your food, and, in addition to that, you wash 
it down with cold water. 



36 "Know Thyself r 

We Americans have much to learn from 
our more mature neighbors across fhe sea in 
this matter of water drinking at table, and the 
sooner we banish the omnipresent pitcher of 
ice-water from its central point there to its 
appropriate place, the better for us all, for 
we work a deal of mischief by our intemper- 
ance in this matter : first, by diluting the gas- 
tric juice, and second, by reducing the temper- 
ature of the stomach. 

Another way in which we invite the foe 
dyspepsia to abide with us is by restricting 
the free and easy motion of the stomach by 
our belts. The habit of wearing belts or bands 
of any kind about the body has too long held 
sway over us. No other animal could endure 
it without having its vitality sadly impaired, 
just as ours has been. And really there is no 
call for belts and bands now, even by that 
most capricious personage we call Fashion, for 
she has most amiably conformed to the grow- 
ing demand for more common-sense in the 
matter of women's attire, and has given us the 
easy- fitting and graceful princesse and polo- 
naise styles, which bring out the graceful con- 
tour of the body without cutting it in two by a 



"Know Thyself :' 37 

belt. The fickle creature really deserves a long 
credit-mark for thus cooperating with the hy- 
gienists in dispensing with all bands and belts 
upon any part of the body. It really seems 
as if she had been studying Physiology and 
Greek art for a change. 

Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the 
whole matter. Chew your food long and well, 
drink no water with it, and wear no bands 
round the body, either over or under the dress; 
so shall you never know dyspepsia, provided 
you get proper food and are temperate at all 
times and in all ways. Do not keep eating a 
thing till you feel uncomfortable, simply be- 
cause it tastes good, else you will be where 
the good old Quaker was of whom we read in 
Boswell's " Johnson." Here is a leaf from his 
diary : 

" Tenth month, 17 — An hypochondriac ob- 
nubilation from wind and indigestion. 

" First month, 22 — A little swinish at din- 
ner. 

" Fourth month, 29 — Mechanically and sin- 
fully dogged." 

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS. 

A few of many questions which have been 



38 "Know Thyself :' 

proffered by different members of schools where 
I have given these lessons will be here and 
there introduced, in the hope that the answers 
may cover some of the many points which 
necessarily go unnoticed where the field is so 
wide. 

"Shall we, then, drink no water?" 
There's a time to drink as well as a time 
to eat, and since water constitutes three-fourths 
of the body, and since three or four pounds of 
this water daily pass out of it by way of the 
lungs, the skin and the kidneys, it is evident 
that an equivalent for this daily loss must be 
provided. Not only this, but the lining of 
the alimentary canal requires to be washed 
after it has done its work, just as the mouth 
and teeth do ; hence it follows that a good 
time to take a full glass of water is two or 
three hours after eating. Two other good 
times are a half hour before breakfast and 
the retiring hour. 

" And shall we drink nothing at table ?" 

Drink all the milk you can get. Milk is 

the most perfect form of food which we 

have provided for us. Man} r will say that 

they can't drink it, that it makes them bilious, 



"Know Thyself \» 39 

etc., etc. This idea lias gained ground by the 
fact that many people eat just as much solid 
food with the milk as they would without it, 
forgetting that the milk is a very rich, nutritious 
food, and that it adds nearly as much to the 
labor of the digestive organs as does so much 
roasted turkey. We are all of us quite as 
apt to be injured by excessive quantities of 
food as by errors in quality. 

"But shall we drink no tea or coffee?" 
When you get to be fifty, if you re- 
quire a staff to lean upon as you begin the 
descent, you can take a cup of properly-made 
coffee in the morning; but be sure you don't 
drink the boiled stuff which is left after the 
aroma has all passed off into the kitchen. Drink 
the best or none. The same with tea. You 
might as well tan your stomach with tan-bark 
as with boiled tea. I have had more cases of 
dyspepsia among servant-girls, caused by boiled- 
tea drinking than from any other single cause. 
During Lent they fast so rigidly — those of 
the Romish faith — that they drink great quan- 
tities of strong tea, by which the lining of 
their stomachs is converted into leather, and 
they are rendered, of all women, most miser- 



40 "Know Thyself r 

able. They had much better live on milk 
during Lent. It would certainly be more eco- 
nomical than tea and sugar and milk and the 
inevitable doctor's bills. 

"What is pepsine?" 

Pepsine is the substance which every 
healthy stomach supplies for the digestion of 
the albuminous portions of the food, such as 
milk, meat, eggs, and the glutinous portions 
of grains. "Dyspepsia" implies an absence 
of pepsine, and when the human stomach is no 
longer able to prepare the article for itself, 
the chemist has to supply the defect by ob- 
taining it from the stomach of the pig. Hor- 
rible to relate, but true ! Pig may be admit- 
ted into Christian society if properly introduced, 
but his credentials are so questionable and his 
personal habits so filthy that it is quite as 
well to take the cleanly ox or sheep, as long 
as we can get them, and leave the dirty porker 
to wallow in his mire and keep his scrofulous 
tendencies in his own family. 

Said the Kev. Adam Clark: "If I wished 
to offer a burnt-offering to the Devil, I would 
send him a pig stuffed with tobacco." And 
his favorite blessing at table was : " Lord, 



"Know Thyself r 41 

bless this fruit and these vegetables ; and if 
thou canst bless under the gospel what thou 
didst curse under the law, bless, we pray thee, 
this swine-flesh." 

I don't believe that the beautiful youth 
Charmides, " the fair soul in the fair_body," 
ever ate pig. 



CHAPTER III. 

WHAT SHALL WE EAT, AND HOW SHALL 
WE COOK IT? 

You have learned from your studies in 
chemistry, or you will learn, that of all the 
sixty-three elements which constitute matter, 
so far as is at present known, only four take 
any large share in the composition of the 
body, namely: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and 
carbon. It is one of the most marvelous as 
well as beautiful evidences of the infinite skill 
of the Creator that he has combined and re- 
combined these few materials in so many dif- 
ferent proportions as to give us bone, and 
muscle, and skin, and nerve, and hair, and 
teeth, and all this nice variety of tissues which 
compel us to say we are " fearfully and won- 



What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 43 

derfully made.'' To these four prominent ele- 
ments a little sulphur, a little phosphorus, a 
little lime, a little chlorine, and a little sodium 
are added in the way of finishing off, some- 
what as the builder of a house "made with 
hands" adds the hinges and the knobs and 
the paint and varnish to the already -con- 
structed frame and superstructure. How these 
few simple elements are held together, and 
how the life comes and goes to and from 
them is the mystery which science has not 
yet unlocked, for now " we see through a glass, 
darkly. 5 ' Probably Paul spoke thus of the 
obscured glass which the Greeks used to soften 
the brightness of their sky ; but we, with our 
clear- glass lenses* in microscope and telescope, 
still see but dimly through the curtain of mys- 
tery which hides God from us. Prof. Draper 
has lately found oxygen in the sun by means 
of the spectroscope, and Prof. Hall has found 
out by his telescope that "Mars has twins"; and 
so they have come so much nearer to God and 
to his secrets than we less able students; but 
neither the microscope nor the telescope nor the 
spectroscope has yet made it possible for man to 
combine oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and car- 



44 What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 

bon so as to make a living plant, much less 
a living animal. But it is a great gain upon 
what the people of earlier times knew, to have 
proved that these four elements are used in 
the making ; and as the years roll on and 
science strides on, we shall hope to learn more 
of the process, being always assured that the 
more we study his works the nearer we get 
to our Maker. 

If we wish to know Beethoven, or Men- 
delssohn, or Raphael, or Phidias, we study 
their works ; and the more we get into the 
spirit of these works, the nearer we come to 
a comprehension of the great artists themselves. 
How much more is this true of the great Artist 
of the Universe ! 

But do you ask what practical answer this 
knowledge brings us toward solving the ques- 
tion u What shall we eat, and how shall we 
cook it ?" 

Let us see ! The chemists and the doctors, 
working together, have found out that starch 
and sugar and fat contain no nitrogen, but that 
meat, milk, eggs and the gluten of grains do 
contain it. Now, our muscles are just like 
what we call " lean meat " in our animal food. 



What to Eat, and Ifoiv to Cook It. 45 

and as they are constantly wearing out and the 
ashes being removed, we naturally ask, What 
is the kind of food which will supply this 
loss? We have the answer before us: Meat, 
milk, eggs and the gluten of whole grains. A 
diet of either or all of these foods will give 
us good muscles. That is a fact as fixed as 
the multiplication-table. 

What, then, do we get from the sugars, 
starches and fats ? Principally fat and heat. 
The Greenlander relishes his candles as a des- 
sert, probably as thoroughly as you do your 
sweetmeats. It is the coal which he must 
have to keep up his fires. You relish your 
cakes and candies and peanuts because your 
bodies call for enough of them to give you a 
layer of wadding between your muscles and 
your skin, to fill out the wrinkles and to keep 
you warm ; but when you find that this layer 
of wadding is getting so thick as to be intru- 
sive, and to fetter the action of the muscles; 
when you get weary on slight exertion, and 
are tempted to squeeze yourself in tight clothes 
to hide your increasing corporosity — then you 
had better cut off your supplies of cakes and 
candies and peanuts. So much for muscle-and- 



46 What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 

fat-making foods. For bones and nerves and 
pure blood you want liberal supplies of fruits 
and grains and vegetables. Oatmeal and corn- 
meal and wheatmeal and ryemeal, each and 
all, will help to keep your bones and nerves 
and brain in good order, provided you get the 
whole goodness of them. If your miller has 
taken oil all the outside envelopes of the 
grain, and has left you nothing but the starch 
of its interior, then are your bones and teeth 
and nerves just so much defrauded, and the 
pigs' bones and teeth and nerves enriched. 

"We come now to the last, but by no means 
least important, part of our question, namely : 
" How shall we cook it % " 

First and last and all the way between, 
don't fry it nor make it into pies ! If you 
have no other way to cook food than to fry it, 
you had better take it raw. I do not make 
one exception, not even that dear delight of 
the New Englander, the ubiquitous doughnut. 
I believe this popular food has been the cause 
of a great deal more dyspepsia than is gener- 
ally suspected. I always observe a great deal 
of eructation of badly-smelling gases by habit- 
ual doughnut eaters, and also by fried-potato 



What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 47 

eaters. You cannot put any food into a more 
difficult form for digestion than by enveloping 
it in a coat of hot fat. You might almost as 
well wrap it in sole-leather. 

Now for the pies. I never see an apple- 
pie without thinking of the sad waste of time 
and labor and substance of which it is the 
outcome. To put that king of fruits, the ap- 
ple, all shaven and shorn of its gorgeous cover- 
ing and the wealth of flavor and fragrance 
and bone food which go with it, into a foul, 
pasty mass of hogs' lard and starch, is for me 
the literal rendering of the wise man's "jewel 
in a swine's snout." 

Hear Joel Benton talk about the apple ! 
"As iron is rated among the metals, so the 
apple ranks among fruits. . . . As the word book 
is appropriated as the fit name for the chief 
book of all, so apple sometimes stands for 
fruit in general. Scripture and geology, which 
have been supposed to differ about some things, 
agree as to its age, both placing its birth just 
a little before man's, as if it were said, 'Now 
the apple is born, it is time for man to be, 
who is destined to eat it.' It is not Genesis, 
but tradition, which makes it the apple that 



48 What to Eat, a?id How to Cook It. 

was put into Eve's hand, and afterward into 
her own and Adam's mouth ; but literature 
seems quite at unison in accepting this version 
of the matter. The unfortunate fruit, what- 
ever it may have been, was said to be of the 
tree of knowledge; and, curiously enough, the 
apple has a very pertinent relation to the brain, 
stimulating its life and its activity, which it 
does by its immense endowment of phospho- 
rus, in which element it is richer than anything 
else in the vegetable kingdom. But phospho- 
rus is not only brain-supporting : it is light- 
bringing; and must thus contribute to knowl- 
edge.... The epicure of this fruit tells you 
they should always be eaten raw ; and the sec- 
ond orthodox rule is, to * dispense with the 
knife.' Any one, however, who is not anx- 
ious to have them as good as they can be, will 
do the next best thing in following this recipe, 
which I will venture to vouch for: Buy a 
small tin apple-corer ; core w r ith it as many 
apples as you want, without peeling them; set 
them on a tin dish ; place this in a hot oven, 
having first filled up the vacancies left by your 
surgery with the best of sugar. Let them 
bake till they are well done. Take them out, 



What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 49 



and if you do not know what to do next, call 
in your nearest and best friend for further ad= 
vice." 

All the cook-books that ever were made, 
or ever will be, cannot give a better recipe 
than that for cooking apples. I always feel 
that I've been swindled when compelled to ac- 
cept apple-sauce as a substitute for the above 
form — that is, apple-sauce according to the ap- 
proved pattern, where all the peelings, and the 
rich flavor and nutriment which go with them, 
have gone to make the pigs glad, and left me 
to grieve over that mistaken notion of the fit- 
ness of things which is forever sacrificing the 
substance for the show. " But they don't look 
nice !" is the only protest which the misguided 
matron offers, and that is quite apt to be a 
sufficient reason for her to continue to do just 
as she always has done. So she peels her ap- 
ples and rolls them up in lard paste, and tells 
you she never gets time to go out-doors for 
any fresh air, when, if she would only look at 
the matter without the spectacles of custom, 
she could put her apples in the oven and leave 
them to take care of themselves while she 
refreshed herself with a brisk half hour or so 



50 What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 

away from her cook-stove and her flour- bar- 
rel. 

It's just so with potatoes, alas ! What a 
deal of time is wasted in peeling them, to say 
nothing of the valuable nutriment which goes 
with that part of them which is right under 
the outer skin ! By all means, bake your po- 
toes with their jackets on, or, if the exigencies 
of the occasion compel you to boil them, then 
boil them with their jackets on, else a large 
part of their best qualities is dissolved and 
thrown away in the water of boiling. 

The best way to cook beef is to broil it or 
roast it. In both cases it should be subjected 
at once to a heat intense enough to form a 
protective crust which shall retain the juices 
at its center. Corned beef contains very little 
of the original nutriment, this having dissolved 
out in the brine, so that we get not much but 
chips. They may have an agreeable taste, due 
to the brine, but it is best to partake sparingly 
of anything which simply pleases the palate, 
but which offers no compensation to the di- 
gestive organs for the labor they must bestow 
upon it. 

If meat is to be boiled, it should be put at 



What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 51 



once into boiling water, for the same reason 
that it should be put in a hot oven to roast: 
so as to assist it to retain as much as possible 
of its own juices. If soup is the objective 
end, then put the meat in cold water and let it 
gently simmer for several hours. Thus may you 
get its substance in the water of cooking, but it 
is poor policy to eat the fibrous remains of 
soup-meat. The virtue has gone from them. 
Put them away from you. Don't attempt to 
economize by making them into mince -pies, 
else it will cost you more to pay your doctor's 
bills than a whole ox, properly cooked, would 
cost. The only thing which is fit to eat in 
a mince-pie is the apple, and that .is only half 
an apple, deprived of its skin. I have seen a 
heart-rending sight during the past summer 
in the way of mince-pies. It was a poor wo- 
man bending over the chopping - bowl and 
rolling-pin and cook-stove, in the heat of mid- 
summer, for the sake of saving (!) some meat 
by putting it with dried apples for mince-pies. 
And this in the height of the berry season, 
and the poor soul thought she couldn't afford 
to buy berries, so she took money enough to 
buy several quarts of berries, and threw it 



52 What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 

away on the 6ugar and spice and greased paste 
which went to make those horrible pies. Ver- 
ily, her children called for berries and she gave 
them stones. 

For bread, find where they keep flour which 
retains all the goodness of the grain, and buy 
no other; then let the bread be twenty-four 
hours old before you eat it. It is not chemically 
done till then. Hot bread is so difficult of 
mastication that it is quite apt to pass into 
the stomach in the form of a bullet, and is 
nearly as indigestible as that article. The 
perfection of bread is found in " Graham gems." 
When properly made, nothing could be nicer. 
When not properly made, nothing could be 
poorer. A light, well-beaten batter of the best 
Graham flour, wet with equal parts of milk 
and water, and dropped upon hot iron pans 
and baked in a quick oven, makes the model 
" Graham gems." The longer you chew T them 
the sweeter they grow and the stronger you 
grow. 

I have seen girls, when out on a tramp, stop 
at a village store and buy doughnuts with which 
to refresh themselves ! The doughnuts made 
them thirsty, and then down went the ice- water. 



What to Eat, and How to Cook It. 53 

Next day they came to school with the com- 
plaint that they had had a headache the night 
before and couldn't study, and so must be 
excused. No wonder they had headache ! The 
brain protests against the poor blood which is 
conveyed to it after such a repast as that. 
There were plenty of nice, ripe pears at the 
same store, to be had for less money than the 
miserable greasy doughnuts cost. The pears 
would have left their brains clear and free from 
aches or clouds. I think they will buy the 
pears next time. And so it is through life : 

" We slight the gifts that every season bears, 
And let them fall unheeded from our grasp." 

Said Milton: 

" ISTot to know of things 
Remote from daily use, obscure and subtle, 
But to know of that which all about us lies in daily 

life, 
Is the true wisdom." 

Let us seek the true wisdom, so may we 

become as fair and as strong as Minerva ! 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE HEART. 

The heart, u that little three-cornered expo- 
nent of our hopes and fears .... What authority 
we have in history or mythology for placing 
the headquarters of god Cupid in this anatom- 
ical seat, rather than in any other, is not very 
clear, but we have it, and it will serve as well 
as any other. Else we might easily imagine, 
upon some other system which might have 
prevailed, for anything our pathology knows 
to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, 
in perfect simplicity of feeling, k Madam, my 
liver and my fortune are entirely at your dis- 
posal.' " — Charles Lamb. 

The sacred Scripture says the heart is " de- 
ceitful and desperately wicked. 7 ' The anato- 



The Heart. 55 

mist calls it " a hollow muscle." The physiol- 
ogist calls it ." a pump." And they are all 
right. It is all these things, and more : for, 
psychologically, it is too deep for the human 
eye to comprehend, and, anatomically, it is the 
one essential muscle upon which the body's 
life depends ; while, physiologically, the integ- 
rity of the valves by which it is so aptly called 
(t a pump " is the feather which may turn the. 
scales for life or death. 

You have learned from your studies in 
zoology, or, if you have not, you will learn, by 
what marvelous gradations from the lower to 
the higher forms of life this most perfect mech- 
anism has been achieved. 

Beginning with the radiates, you will find 
a simple tube in the rays of the star-fish, which 
is at once a water-pipe to supply the impetus 
for motion, by conveying numberless little 
streams into its tubular feet, and which at 
the same time acts as a pulsatory heart — a 
very simple heart, to be sure, but one which 
serves its purpose just as well as yours serves 
you. The sea-urchin gets a step or two higher 
and gets a ring-shaped heart around his 8eso- 
phagus, or swallow-tube; while his mastership 



56 The Heart, 

the clam, one of the princes among mollusks, 
actually comes to the dignity of a two-cham- 
bered heart, with a real auricle and a ventri- 
cle. He is even more gifted in the way of a 
heart than any of his more active friends in 
the sub-kingdom of articulates — the crabs, the 
lobsters, the moths, and the butterflies, and all 
those fine people with their gay feathers; for 
they have only a straight tube running along 
their backs. If you get a live clam and invite 
him to make himself comfortable in a pan of 
fresh sea-water, and then gently remove his 
left valve, you can see his heart beat, if you 
look in the right place. As old Roger Bacon 
told the people away back in the thirteenth 
century, when they asked him how he made 
his gunpowder, " Take of saltpeter, with pound- 
ed carbon and sulphur, and you will then make 
thunder and lightning, if you know how to 
prepare them." So if you know how to look 
for the heart of a clam, you will find it, and 
you can also count his pulse beats, as he is one 
of the cool and collected kind of people who 
never get up a palpitation of the heart on any 
slight provocation. 

The fishes also boast of a two-chambered 



The Heart. 57 

heart, and his frogship and his snakeship get 
so far up in the ranks as to have three rooms 
in their hearts. This, you will easily see, if 
you study into the matter, results in a mixed 
quality of blood, so that no one of these people 
can boast of any real "true blue blood," al- 
though they are of the race of vertebrates, 
each having a real backbone all to himself. 
The upper-crust people who live on the top 
rounds of the ladder are obliged to count them 
in, but they by no means put them on an equal- 
ity with the rest of the backbones, who have 
four rooms to their hearts. 

If you have never seen the inside of the 
perfect mammalian heart, let me ask you to go 
and get one from your market-man as soon as 
possible. That of a pig, a sheep, a calf, or an 
ox will serve you. Then take your physiology 
book and find out its beauties. You will see 
just how your own heart looks, and you will 
never wonder that the poets have said so much 
about it in a figurative way. 

Let us now turn to the consideration of 
what this little four-chambered " three-cornered 
exponent of our hopes and fears " does for us. 
Into its right upper chamber, or " auricle," as 



58 The Heart. 

it is called, from its resemblance in shape to a 
little ear, as the word signifies, comes the liquid 
which has been prepared from the food by the 
organs of digestion. The stomach, the liver, 
the pancreas, and the intestinal glands have all 
been at work to transform the bread and milk, 
and the candies and the peanuts, and, alas ! 
the doughnuts, too, into a lit form for their 
reappearance as bone and muscle and brain 
and nerve and all those complicated fabrics of 
which each of our bodies is made. But before 
this liquid result of so much work can appear 
in such high company it must report at the 
central office, the heart. Entering its " Yor- 
hof," as the Germans call it, or vestibule, it is 
passed on through the most beautiful system 
of gates, called the tri-cuspid, or three-pointed 
valves, to the right lower chamber, or " ventri- 
cle "; thence to the lungs, where it receives the 
finishing touches in the way of exchanging its 
carbonic acid, or its old clothes, for the life- 
giving oxygen which there awaits its coming, 
in lungs which are left to work as their Maker 
intended they should. Returning thence, 
brightened and vivified, it enters the left ves- 
tibule or auricle, is pumped past a beautiful 



The Heart. 59 

two-pointed valve from there to the left ven- 
tricle, whence it issues through some most 
delicate half-mo on -shaped valves into a large 
tube called the " aorta." which there begins 
to send off branches to all parts of the body 
and its extremities, so that every tissue may 
receive a supply of nourishment. On it sweeps, 
this life-current, with its bone-food, its nerve- 
food, and its muscle-food, so swiftly that it gets 
back to the heart, through the capillaries and 
veins, in twenty-five or thirty seconds from the 
time it leaves it, bringing a supply of worn-out 
material which it has taken in on its round, in 
exchange for the new goods it carried out. 
"Like the water flowing through the Croton 
pipes, that carries health and wealth to the por- 
tals of every house, and tilth and disease from 
every doorway, the blood, flowing through the 
canals of the organization, carries nutriment to 
all the tissues and refuse from them. Its cur- 
rent sweeps nourishment in and waste out." 

It is comparatively an easy thing to describe 
the circulation of the blood after it has been 
shown us, but it took centuries of hard study to 
find it out, and it is only three centuries since 
Dr. William Harvey, of England, who gave 



60 The Heart. 

to the world the true statement of it, was born. 
For full three centuries before Christ and for 
sixteen centuries after him the wise men had 
been asking nature to reveal this wonderful 
secret to them. Each of them came a little 
nearer to the truth than his predecessor, but 
the glory of the final discovery belongs to 
Harvey. 

I wish, my dear girls, that I might help 
you to comprehend, in some slight measure, 
the perfectness of God's plan, as thus described, 
for keeping your whole bodies supplied with 
pure blood, so that your cheeks shall always 
wear the rose-tint of health, and your eyes 
always sparkle with the light which shines out 
only from brains which are fed with such 
blood. " Polished steel is not quicker dimmed 
by the breath than is the brain affected by 
some abnormal condition of the blood." 

Every headache is a protest which the brain 
puts forth, either against the unclean blood 
which is sent to it, or against an excess of 
either arterial or venous blood. If you have 
eaten three or four hot biscuits for supper and 
poured down one or two glasses of cold water, 
you have taken one way to get a headache, 



The Heart. 61 

and a bad breath which will report you to 
your neighbors next morning. If you have 
added to this one or two pieces of rich cake, 
or a piece of mince-pie, you may be pretty sure 
of an aching head with troubled dreams. The 
brain is fastidious in its choice of blood, and 
will not accept the stuff which comes from 
half-digested fried food, hot biscuits and pies, 
without protesting. Eat only bread which is 
twenty-four hours old, chew it well and moisten 
it only with your own saliva — given you for 
that very purpose ; omit the pies, fried things 
and rich cakes, and your head will never ache 
because of dirty blood : certainly not if you eat 
plenty of apples, either baked or raw, with 
their skins on. Chew the skins well until 
you have extracted all their virtue, and then 
reject such portions as may be too tough to be 
finely chewed. When you cannot get apples, 
get the best substitute you can find. All kinds 
of fresh fruit, such as the market supplies at 
all seasons — whether oranges, bananas., grapes, 
peaches, tomatoes, berries or melons- — are infi- 
nitely better blood purifiers than all the nos- 
trums ever concocted for the ostensible purpose 
of effecting this object ; and when you cannot 



62 The Heart. 

get the fresh fruits, get either the dried or the 
canned ones. Every dollar you spend for fruits 
is so much saved in the way of doctors' bills, 
and every pie you eat is as good as a prescrip- 
tion for the dose of pills which will be pretty 
sure to follow it. As for pig-meat, however 
served — whether as Extract casiene caput 
(head-cheese), Pulv. Sausccgiae (sausage-powder), 
or Infus. Baconii (bacon infusion) — whoever 
eats it is pretty sure to pay heavily for it, un- 
less she spends the next six or eight hours out- 
doors in active exercise, so as to get oxygen 
enough to burn up the stuff. One may be 
pardoned for eating pig -meat when nothing 
else can be had, but, as long as the markets 
abound in so many better things, pray let us 
leave the pig in his own mire and not soil 
our brains with his foulness. 

But the head may ache, and often does, if 
it has too much blood, even if it be of nor- 
mal quality. In fact, a large proportion of our 
aches mean that the blood is in the wrong 
place, and all the doctor can do is to " derive " 
it from the aching spot to one remote from it 
by the various ways with which all are familiar. 
But what makes it get into the wrong place ? 



The Heart. 63 

Many things make it. If yon wear too little 
clothing on the feet and lower extremities in 
cold, wet weather, the blood will not go into 
them to warm them, but will take the easiest 
route, to the head, which will then cry out, in 
its agony, "My veins are full to bursting, 
and I ache terribly." The same result will 
follow if the shoes be tight or the hose are 
kept in place by bands about the extremities. 
Any band, elastic or otherwise^ which is tight 
enough to keep the hose smooth is tight 
enough to interfere with the circulation of the 
blood. Don't wear it ! There is a way of ad- 
justing hose, which you can learn at any 
dress-reform store, whereby they are kept per- 
fectly smooth, and not a single blood-vessel in 
the whole body is compressed. It dispenses 
with all bands, and is thoroughly comfortable 
and convenient. Get it, wear it, and tell all 
your mates to get it! 

The head may ache, too, because the mus- 
cles are not exercised enough, and because it is 
oppressed with the blood which ought to be 
freely circulating through them. Some of you 
bend over your books too long at a time, and 
some of you sit at the piano too long, and some 



64 The Heart. 

of you sit at the sewing-machine too long, 
and your muscles get pale and flabby and your 
head gets hot and heavy ; and, too often, in- 
stead of taking the warning and rushing out 
for a good, brisk walk in the open air, you 
make a bad matter worse by shutting your- 
selves in your close rooms and sipping tea. 
That is the poorest possible substitute for fresh 
air and exercise. You will get no bloom on 
your cheeks and no light in your eyes by 
drinking tea, but you will grow yellow and 
withered, like the " sere and yellow leaf," 
which has lost its sources of nutriment. When 
you see a young woman whose skin looks like 
old flannel, showing traces of the starch-box 
or the rouge-pot, it is pretty safe to infer that 
she gets very little exercise in the open air 
and that she is a confirmed tea-toper. Let the 
tea stay in China till you come to your fifties 
or sixties, and you may be sure of being as 
handsome as old ladies as you will be as young 
ones. 

" What causes varicose veins ?" 

Varicose veins are swellings in the veins 
caused by interruptions to the circulation of 
the venous blood. You will understand, from 



The Heart. 65 

what has been told you, that the blood has to 
flow upward in the veins of the trunk and 
lower extremities in order to return to the 
heart, and a little thought will show you how 
easily you can interfere with this current by 
wearing bands about the body or lower ex- 
tremities. These all-too-prevalent bands are a 
common cause of varicose veins. Habitual 
standing is another cause. 

"What causes palpitation of the heart?" 
In the majority of cases, indigestion is the 
cause. The heart is located directlv above the 
stomach, with only the diaphragm between 
them. The diaphragm is the muscular floor 
of the chest. If the stomach becomes distended 
with the gases of indigestion, it crowds the 
diaphragm up against the heart. The heart 
then utters its protest against the intrusion by 
a more rapid beating, for it has no room to 
spare in a chest which is held still by bones 
and bands and steels, no matter how loose 
they may be. There can be no natural or 
free motion for ribs and muscles which are 
always worn in splints, and where the ribs 
and their muscles are thus fettered the heart is 
sorely perplexed by any additional crowding 



66 The Heart. 

from below, such as it is subjected to when 
digestion is arrested. 

"What is the cause of cold feet?" 
Anything which prevents the blood from 
circulating freely in the feet will tend to keep 
them cold. In addition to the bands already 
mentioned, whether elastic or otherwise, insuf- 
ficient exercise in the open air is a common 
cause of cold feet, and the best of all ways 
for warming them is to take a brisk walk on 
the sunny side, having first prepared them by 
putting on warm hose and thick, broad-soled 
and low-heeled shoes. You can no more walk 
properly in thin, narrow-soled, high-heeled 
shoes than you can on stilts ; nor can you get 
the full benefit of a walk if you keep your 
arms rolled in a shawl or folded in a muff. 
The hands should be so protected that the arms 
may fall naturally by the side when walking. 
There can be no really graceful walking with 
folded arms. 

" How may cold, sweaty feet be cured ?" 

By clothing them so that the blood may 

circulate freely in them,, and by keeping them 

familiar with clean water and fresh towels. A 



The Heart. 67 

good plan is to plunge them rapidly, first into 
hot and then into cold water, two or three 
times on retiring, and then rub them very dry 
with coarse towels. 



CHAPTER V. 

HOW WE BREATHE. 

"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life ; and man became a living soul." — Genesis ii, 7. 

In our lessons upon the skeleton we have 
learned how carefully the framework of the 
human nose is prepared for the important part 
it is destined to take in the function of respir- 
ation. "We have seen how delicately the bones 
about the nostrils are turned and coiled so as 
to increase the surface over which the air 
must pass on its way to the lungs, and that 
the result of this extension of surface is the 
warming of the cold air to the proper temper- 
ature for its reception into their more delicate 
cells. 



How We Breathe. 69 

If you look now at the entrance to your 
nostrils, you will see how carefully it is guarded 
by little hairs, whose office it is to sift the air 
and thus render it still more fit for its be- 
coming "the breath of life." The lesson 
taught us by Moses in the above quotation 
from his history of the Creation, so sublime in 
its simplicity, is emphasized by the anatomical 
study of the nostrils, and one is more and 
more deeply impressed with the profound in- 
sight of the "Man of God" into the designs 
of the Creator whose works he so faithfully 
studied. Many a writer of books upon anat- 
omy and physiology has since enforced the 
truth that the nose is the preparatory organ 
of respiration ; that the perfection of every 
function depends upon the thoroughness with 
which its initiatory work is done, and that all 
the higher orders of animal life breathe their 
air, while frogs and turtles and their kin swal- 
low it ; but no one of them all has said as 
much on pages as Moses said in this one 
brief sentence. Let us heed the lesson ! Let 
us apply it to every act of our lives, and so, 
by making our beginnings aright, shall we en- 



70 How We Breathe. 

sure that success which crowns all work which 
is well begun ! 

Have you ever noted the imperfect breath- 
ing of people who, either from habit or from 
deformity, swallow their air, instead of taking 
it by the nostrils ? And have you observed 
the noise they make about it ? Audible breath- 
ing is not in accordance with the divine plan. 
All of nature's finest processes, like the growth 
of tissues, the circulation of sap and blood, and 
the entrance of the air into the lungs, are noise- 
less. Let the air enter as God meant to have 
it, and it will enter with no sound for the most 
sensitive ear at the ordinary distance between 
individuals; but let it enter through a mouth 
which is habitually open, and the sound be- 
comes offensively apparent. " The worst wheel 
squeaks the loudest."' Such breathers are an 
annoyance to their companions by day and a 
positive nuisance by night. There would be 
no snoring to echo through dormitories if all 
breathed as God meant they should, and one 
of the ways to prevent it is to hold the lips 
together by an apparatus recently invented by 
Dr. Wyeth for the purpose, for those who have 



How We Breathe. 71 

been allowed to develop the habit by the in* 
attention of their nurses in childhood. 

You will notice - another characteristic of 
this class of breathers. They always seem to 
have a cold, as evinced by imperfect articula- 
tion and the other accompaniments of a " cold 
in the head.'' They generally have large ton- 
sils, too, and in this condition it is difficult 
to discriminate between cause and effect, for 
the large tonsils may have induced the habit 
of breathing with the mouth open, and, on the 
other hand, the mouth - breathing may have 
caused the enlargement of the tonsils; but, 
whichever may be the cause, the indications 
for treatment are identical, and point to the 
reduction of the size of the tonsils. 

This brings us to the consideration of the 
second part of our breathing apparatus, namely, 
the throat, at whose entrance stand the tonsils, 
but whose office is not yet accurately under- 
stood. Indeed, Dr. Robinson, writing upon 
the subject, goes so far as to say, " Were I 
to make a man, I do not think I would put 
tonsils in him.' 1 But as we all have them, it 
is safe to conclude that they are essential, rather 
than superfluous, organs. It is no less safe to 



72 How We Breathe, 

conclude that if we learn and obey the laws 
by which the rest of the body is kept in healthy 
action, we shall not find them to be a source 
of annoyance and discomfort. 

Let us look, for a moment, at some of the 
other results incident to their enlargement, ad- 
ditional to the one already mentioned. From 
the throat there is a tube, on each side, which 
communicates with each ear. The closure of 
these tubes by the enlarged tonsils may lead 
to deafness, and often does. These three seri- 
ous results, namely, faulty respiration, muffled 
and imperfect vocalization, and deafness, are 
all common conditions among mouth-breathers. 
But a still more serious complication comes in 
as a result of large tonsils in growing children, 
in that the growth and development of the 
chest and lungs may be arrested in consequence 
of the interruption to complete filling of the 
lungs which large tonsils necessarily ofter. 
This may be a cause of consumption in after 
life, for this destroyer finds its surest victims 
among those who have small, poorly-developed 
lungs. Thus you see what agents for evil 
these little bodies become if allowed to grow 
too large. 



How We Breathe. 73 

The question at once arises, How shall this 
enlargement be prevented ? Nothing could be 
simpler or more natural than the indication 
which at once suggests itself to the thoughtful, 
namely, to guard against excessive flow of 
blood to the parts in question — the same 
point, you will remember, which was made 
prominent in our lessons upon circulation. 
Keep the blood in the right place, and all goes 
well, provided its quality is good. Granted 
an excess of it at any one point, and there 
is an inevitable protest at that point against 
the intrusion. 

If, for want of proper protection, the sur- 
face and extremities of the body are habitually 
chilled, especially in childhood and youth, dur- 
ing the whole growing period of twenty-five 
years, ii: is more than probable that the above 
conditions will result. We are all of us, young 
women and middle-aged women, and children, 
too, inclined to muffle the throat too warmly, 
thereby inviting the blood to concentrate at 
that point, when it ought to be in the hands 
and feet, keeping them warm. Furs about the 
neck are in the wrong place. They should be 
on the feet and hands ; and the yards of 



74 How We Breathe. 

woolen mufflers which one sees wound about 
the necks of children should be on their legs 
rather than there. 

But the best of all ways to insure one's self 
from sore throat and swollen tonsils is to keep 
the entire skin active and ruddy by making it 
as familiar with cold water as the hands and 
face are wont to be. Said Miss Jane Porter, 
the novelist, to her brother, who was a physi- 
cian : "I am always catching cold everywhere 
but in my face. I wish my body was all face." 
" Make it so," was his reply. It is easy to 
form the habit- if one begins in early life; and, 
when it is formed, the daily morning ablution 
in fresh, cold water becomes the one luxury 
which, of all others, we would least willingly 
forego ; while the perfect exemption from colds 
and sore throats which it secures is a state of 
things which makes life a constant joy. Can 
you think of any greater joy than to be always 
well and strong ? To be able to say, I can 
go and come in all weathers and at all times, 
because I never take cold ! 

We pass now from the tonsils to the larynx, 
or organ of vocalization. This is one of the 
most delicately formed organs in the body. 



How We Breathe. 75 

Through it comes and goes every " breath of 
life," and upon its vocal cords hang the sweet- 
est harmonies of life. If the air is breathed 
through the nostrils, and by them warmed and 
sifted ; if the throat and tonsils are not sur- 
charged with blood which ought to be in the 
feet and cannot get there because of the bands 
and tight shoes in the way ; if, in short, Na- 
ture can carry the air through the larynx in 
her own good way, there will be no discord 
there. The mythical " music of the spheres " 
can be no more harmonious than the melody of 
a perfectly correct human voice. Sa} r s George 
MacDonald : " A sweet tone is a messenger of 
God; and a right harmony and sequence of 
such is a little gospel." 

There has never been a time when the hu- 
man voice has not been an instrument of power, 
a charm, a delight. When we pass beyond 
history to the regions of fable, we find that, 
among the gods of the ancient Greeks, those 
were held in the highest honor whose voices 
had a sound potent for good or evil. Jove, 
the imperial monarch of Olympus, had but to 
direct the lightning and command the thunder. 



76 How We Breathe. 

Homer writes: 
"He speaks, and awful bends his sable brow, 
Shakes his ambrosial curls and gives the nod, 
The stamp of fate and sanction of a god. 
High Heaven, with trembling, the dread signal takes, 
And all Olympus to the center shakes." 

Of the nine muses, six reached gods and 
mortals through the voice; and to Calliope, 
the muse of eloquence and poetry, was given 
the precedence. 

If we put faith in the grand opening of 
biblical history, it was the voice of the serpent 
that beguiled Eve ; and it was the soft voice of 
the first mother that, falling upon the ear and 
heart of Adam, betrayed him to hi6 undoing; 
and, whether we accept the narrative literally 
or as an allegory, a hush falls upon the spirit 
as we read of the voice of the Lord God in 
the garden, calling upon the man and saying, 
"Where art thou?" 

Jubal was the father of those who played 
upon the harp, and there is little doubt that 
the first musical instruments, as are all later 
ones, were but feeble attempts to imitate the 
notes given forth by the human larynx, or to 
accompany the songs of joy and praise of the 
people. 



How We Breathe. 77 

Miriam sang, after the passage of the Red 
Sea, those magnificent words which form most 
thrilling passages in our sacred music and or- 
atorio, i; Sing ye to the Lord, for lie hath 
triumphed gloriously ! " and Hebrew history, 
full of war and bloodshed, of idol worship and 
sin, as it is, is more than redeemed by Hebrew 
poetry. Nay, if we go from Earth to the Be- 
yond, we find the poets and seers, w T hose fan- 
cies paint its attractions for mortals, as in the 
vision of John, telling us of ten thousand times 
ten thousand surrounding the throne, with 
voices and harps attuned to the majestic melo- 
dies of the skies. 

But if we fail to conceive, with our limited 
faculties of celestial sounds, and listen only to 
mortal tones, we shall have the fullness and 
the glory of the human voice revealed to us 
even more forcibly than by any flight of the 
imagination. We know its compass, we ac- 
knowledge its power, we listen with rapture to 
its melodious utterances, we feel in our thrilled 
hearts its touching tenderness. 

The capacity of the human voice is beyond 
that of all the musical instruments ever in- 
vented. In its tones we can read the mind 



78 How We Breathe. 

of the speaker, without seeing his face. Hope, 
fear, anger, revenge, love, hatred, despair, are 
told with unerring directness. 

The voice of Parepa brought adoring thou- 
sands to her feet. Woman, through her words 
of love and tenderness, has exercised a greater 
power over the race than have all the mon- 
archs, backed by all the armies, of the world. 

In sickness, her tones of tender sympathy 
are often more efficacious than medicine ; and 
the strong man, brought low by suffering, and 
the restless intant are alike soothed to slumber 
by a woman's low voice. 

There is no characteristic in a mother, a 
teacher or a nurse which is more readily caught 
up and echoed than the habitual tone of her 
voice. A screaming, scolding, harsh -voiced 
mother or teacher will be very sure to find 
her own tones reflected to her by the little 
ones who are so unfortunate as to hear them. 

Thackeray says : " The world is a looking- 
glass, and gives to each individual the reflec- 
tion of the face he brings to it. Smile on it, 
and it will smile in return. Frown on it, and 
it will frowm in return." Children are no less 
accurate mirrors, which reflect, in tone, mannei 



How we Breathe, 79 

and action of all kinds, the habits of those 
whom they oftenest encounter. 

The most delightful school I ever saw was 
a primary school, of nearly a hundred children, 
presided over by one woman, whose voice was 
the very essence of gentleness. During a series 
of visits there I never heard her raise her voice 
above the ordinary tones of conversation ; but 
those tones were exquisitely modulated, and 
so clear and pure that they readied the most 
distant ears in all their purity. The children's 
voices were like hers. They never screamed 
at her, for she never screamed at them. They 
never spoke in fretful or peevish tones to her, 
for. she never spoke in any but cheerful tones 
to them. Do you ask the secret of her power 
over them, by which she kept them from rest- 
lessness and noisiness ? She loved them, and 
her voice showed that she loved them. Added 
to this tender child-love there was a self-control 
which, above all else, is essential to the control 
of others. She kept her whole body subject 
to the dictates of her reason. She knew that 
she could do little in her chosen profession, 
4 ' To teach the immortal mind, no mean employ ; " 



80 How We Breathe. 

unless she kept her body in health ; and she 
knew that her voice depended upon large lungs 
for its power, its sweetness and its endurance. 
So she gave her lungs the largest liberty, in 
ways which you shall hear. 



CHAPTEE YL 

• HOW WE BREATHE.— Continued. 

From the nostrils to the larynx, and from 
the larynx through the trachea and bronchi to 
the lungs, is not far, but "'tis enough" for all 
that Nature would do for us there if she can 
have her own way. And how rare is the 
workmanship there displayed ! We saw, in our 
lesson upon the circulation of the blood, by 
what gradations in the animal scale she came 
to that perfection of function which results 
from a four-chambered heart, and it remains 
for us to trace out a no less striking gradation 
up to the human lung. 

All animals are classed as air-breathers or 
water-breathers, and all breathe either by means 
of tubes, gills or lungs. Kespiration in ani- 



82 How We Breathe. 

mals, whatever be its mode of execution, has 
always the same object, namely: the exchange 
of carbonic acid, or waste product of tissue 
wear, for oxygen. The earth, the air and the 
water are each and all so rich in this life- 
giving element that each and all can get the 
requisite amount from their native element, 
whatever that element be. 

The sponges and coral polyps, and all those 
very humble little people who are so small 
that it takes a microscope to find them, do 
not have any special apparatus set apart for 
the purpose of respiration, but they breathe 
at one part of the body just as well as at an- 
other. Certainly a very convenient arrange- 
ment, which we might be led to covet under 
some circumstances. 

The star-fishes, sea-urchins and their rela- 
tives have a curious " water-pipe system," by 
means of which their air and their blood and 
their water are carried round to them all at 
once. This plan has also its obvious advan- 
tages; but when we rise to the estate of the 
clam and the oyster, who live in " marble 
halls" with folding-doors, we find a great ad- 
vance in the style of their breathing, in that 



How We Breathe. 83 

they have very elegantly constructed gills, most 
finely fringed, by means of which their blood 
comes to be of quite a select quality compared 
with that of the people below them, although 
it is neither blue blood nor yet red, but simply 
white. The fishes, however, have the perfec- 
tion of water - breathing apparatus, and you 
have only to lift the gill-covers of the next 
one you see to find how delicate and beautiful 
it is. You will find four or more strong arches 
supporting little fringes whose component parts 
consist of minute loops of arteries and veins, 
which meet here to exchange the carbonic acid 
which has been picked up by the veins all 
over the body for the oxygen which the water 
brings to the waiting arteries. Those arches 
are the gill arches, and the fringes on them 
are the gills, and the gills are for the fish 
exactly what your lungs are for you : the sine 
qua non of his existence. Keep his gills wet, 
and life goes on smoothly for him. Let them 
get dry, and the way is rough. So, if you can 
get air for your lungs, life is a joy; but close 
np this sole avenue for your " breath of life," 
and your sun must go down in darkness. Not 
so with the insect world. They have air tubes 



84 How We Breathe. 

all over the body. Catch a grasshopper and 
look on the sides of his abdomen, and you will 
see little openings, like a row of button-holes, 
through which the air enters and animates his 
body. Then take your microscope and find 
the coils of air-tubing all wound up in him, and 
you will understand why he is so very much 
alive : because he gets so much fresh air. J^o 
wonder he sings all the time ! Anybody feels 
like it when the body is full of pure oxygen. 
Do you know the story of the grasshoppers, as 
told by Plato in the dialogue called " Phse- 
drus" ? Listen to it : 

Socrates ia represented as having gone out 
to walk, at mid-day, with his friend. Seated 
under a plane-tree, he says: "A lover of 
music like yourself ought surely to have heard 
the story of the grasshoppers, who are said 
to have been human beings in an age before 
the muses. And when the muses came, and 
song appeared, they were ravished with de- 
light, and, singing always, never thought of 
eating and drinking, until at last they forgot, 
and died. And now they live again in the 
grasshoppers; and this is the return which the 
muses make to them : they hunger no more, 



How We jBreathe. 85 

neither thirst any more, but are always sing- 
ing, from the moment they are born, and never 
eating or drinking; and when they die, they 
go and inform the muses who honor them on 
earth. They win the love of Terpsichore for 
the dancers by their report of them; of Erato 
for the lovers; and of the other muses for 
those who do them honor, according to the 
several ways of honoring them ; of Calliope, 
the eldest muse, and of her who is next to her, 
for the votaries of philosophy, for these are 
the muses who are chiefly concerned with 
heaven and the ideas, divine as well as human, 
and they have the sweetest utterance." 

All insects have these breathing-tubes dis- 
tributed all through their bodies. They are 
called tracheae, and correspond in function to 
the lungs of the higher vertebrates. 

The simplest form of the lung of the verte- 
brates may be seen in the frog. I wish every 
one of you would give herself the pleasure of 
seeing this wonder of creation at her first op- 
portunity. A toad will do just as well as a 
frog. You have only to put him in a bottle 
with a handkerchief saturated with sulphuric 
ether, and, as soon as he is sound asleep, open 



86 How We Breathe. 

the skin of his abdomen with a sharp knife 
or scissors. You will see the pretty lungs all 
inflated, and the little heart beating between 
them. Then cut out the little heart before he 
wakes, and he never will know that he has 
been cut, and you will have seen just how one 
of the air-cells of your lungs looks. Now you 
have only to imagine cluster after cluster of 
these delicate little sacs, all opening into the 
bronchial tubes, by the thousand, and you will 
have a very good picture of your own lungs. 
I hope you will also realize what an awfully 
wicked thing it is to squeeze the lungs. Be- 
lieve me, my dear girls, you can do your bodies 
no greater favor than to let your chests remain 
in just the shape your Maker left them. He 
knows very much better how to shape them 
than you or your dressmaker know. He has 
put no less than thirty-nine bones into the 
walls of your chests, and you need no 
more. There is a set of muscles between each 
pair of your ribs, and a diaphragm at the bot- 
tom of the chest, and He who put them there 
meant that they should be alwaj^s in motion, 
from the time you draw your first breath till 
you die, and whenever you surround the chest 



How We Breathe. 87 

with bauds or bones you do just what the 
surgeon does for a broken bone : you put these 
muscles all in splints and hold them still, and 
from that moment you are only half as much 
alive as you ought to be. 

It matters not if you answer that your 
bands and your bones are loose. Your broth- 
ers do not have bands and artificial bones to 
hold them in shape, and you have just as many 
bones as they have. It matters not if you 
tell me that you cannot hold yourself up with- 
out corsets. You can do what you should do, 
and you should hold up your own bodies by 
the means which God has given you for that 
purpose. 

Hear what Canon Kingsley said to you 
in one of -his best books, entitled "Health 
and Education r : 

" I suppose you will all allow that the 
Greeks were, so far as we know, the most 
beautiful race that the world ever saw. These 
people had made physical as well as intellect- 
ual education a science, as well as a- study. 
Their women practiced graceful, and, in some 
cases, even athletic, exercises. They devel- 
oped, by a free and healthy life, those figures 



88 How We Breathe. 

which remain everlasting and unapproachable 
models of human beauty. But — they wore 
no stays. The first mention of stays that I 
have found is in the letters of Synesius, Bishop 
of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about 
four hundred years after the Christian era. 

" He tells us how, when he was shipwrecked 
on a remote part of the coast, and he and the 
rest of the passengers were starving on cockles 
and limpets, there was among them a slave- 
girl out of the far East, who had a pinched 
wasp-waist, such as you see on the old Hindu 
sculptures, and such as you see on any street 
in a British town. 

"And when the Greek ladies found her 
out, they sent for her from house to house, to 
see this new and prodigious waist, with which 
it seemed to them impossible for a human being 
to breathe or live ; and they petted the poor 
girl, and fed her as they might a dwarf, till 
she got quite fat and comfortable, while her 
owners had not enough to eat. So strange 
and ridiculous seemed our present fashion to 
the descendants of those who, centuries be- 
fore, had imagined, because they had seen 



How We Breathe. 89 

living and moving, those glorious statues which 
we pretend to admire, but refuse to imitate. 

"It seems to me that a few centuries hence, 
when mankind has learned to fear God more, 
and therefore to obey more strictly the laws 
of nature and of science, which are the will of 
God — it seems to me that in those days the 
present fashion of corset-wearing will be looked 
back upon as a contemptible and barbarous 
superstition, denoting a very low level of civil- 
ization in the people who practiced it. 

" That for generations past women should 
have been in the habit — not to please men, 
who do not care about the matter as a point of 
beauty, but simply to vie with each other in 
obedience to a something called Fashion — that 
they should, I say, have been in the habit of 
deliberately crushing that part of the body 
which should be specially left free, contracting 
and displacing their lungs, their heart and all 
the most vital and important organs, and en- 
tailing thereby disease not only on themselves, 
but on their children after them ; that for 
fifty years past physicians should have been 
telling them of the folly of what they have 
been doing; and that they should, as yet, in 



90 How We Breathe. 

the great majority of cases, not only turn a 
deaf ear to all warnings, but actually deny the 
offense, of which one glance of the physician 
or of the sculptor, who knows what shape the 
human body ought to be, brings them in guilty : 
this, I say, is an instance of — what shall I 
call it ? which deserves the lash, not merely 
of the satirist, but of any theologian who really 
believes that God made the physical universe. 

" If one chooses a horse or a dog, whether 
for strength or for speed or for any useful pur- 
pose, the first thing to be looked at is the girth 
round the ribs : the room for heart and lungs. 
Exactly in proportion to that will be the ani- 
mal's general healthfulness, power of endur- 
ance, and value in many ways. 

" If you will look at eminent orators who 
have attained a healthy old age, you will see 
that in every case they are men of large size 
both in the lower and in the upper part of the 
chest ; men who had, therefore, a peculiar 
power of using the diaphragm to fill and clear 
the lungs, and therefore oxygenate the blood 
of the whole body. Now, it is just these lower 
ribs, across which the diaphragm is stretched 



How We Breathe. 9i 

like the head of a drum, which stays contract 
to a minimum. 

"If you advised the owners of horses and 
hounds to put them into stays in order to 
increase their beauty, you would receive a very 
decided refusal. And if you advised an orator 
to put himself into stays, he would reply that 
to comply with the request would involve the 
giving up of public work, under the probable 
penalty of being dead within the twelvemonth. 

"And how much work of every kind, intel- 
lectual as well as physical, is spoiled or hin- 
dered ; how many deaths occur from consump- 
tion, and other complaints, which are the result 
of stays — is known partly to the medical men, 
who lift up their voices in vain, and fully 
known to Him who will not interfere with the 
least of his own physical laws to save human 
beings from the consequences of their own 
willful folly." 

The good man who said all these good 
things to us has gone where corsets and other 
wicked things " cease from troubling," but I 
am sure his blessing rests on the " dress-reform " 
of which I am going to tell you farther on, 
and which enables you to look your very pret- 



9% Sow We Breathe. 

tiest, while it, at the same time, leaves jour 
chest free to expand to its uttermost. * 

And now, in reply to your questions about 
catarrh and colds, and so on, I have only to 
say, as I have already done : Keep the blood in 
the right place, and leave all its channels un- 
fettered by any bands; give the lungs the 
largest liberty; keep the skin of the whole 
body active and familiar with fresh air and 
cold water ; do not muffle the neck too much, 
but be very sure that the feet are so clad that 
they are always warm. Catarrh in the head 
and cold feet always go together. Keep the 
feet warm and dry, and you cannot have catarrh. 
Bo not expect to cure a catarrh by snuffs or 
any patent nostrum. Sublata causa, cessat ef- 
fectus: The cause removed, the effect ceases. 
Above all things, avoid going to sit, stand 
or lie in a cool, breezy place when you are 
warm from active exercise. That is a sure way 
to catch the "death cold." Do not stand by 
open windows or open doors when the air of 
the house is warmer than that out. You are 
subjected to a strong draft which is sure to 
result in a "cold." Do not stop to talk in 
the doorway when parting from a friend. Say 



How We Breathe. 93 

what you have to say in the house, and, when 
you get to the door, go on your way at once. 

Do not arrest a friend on a windy corner 
w T hen walking, for a five minutes' chat. You 
may both get chilled fatally. Rather turn and 
walk in your friend's direction till your chat is 
over. 

Do not throw off your wraps too suddenly 
when coming in warm wuth exercise, but "let 
your moderation be known to all." 

Do not talk much when walking in a cold, 
frosty air, but keep the mouth closed, that the 
air may be warmed by the nostrils. 

Avoid very hot rooms, with the moisture 
all dried out of the air. Have a thermometer, 
and never tolerate a temperature above sixty- 
eight or seventy. Fahrenheit. 

Change the air of your room every hour. 
An hour is long enough to remain in one 
position or in one room without change. Never 
6it, eat or sleep in a north room if you can 
help it. The north side of the house belongs 
to the refrigerator and the store-room. Let 
the sun shine into all your rooms as much as 
possible. You had better have faded carpets 
than faded faces. Be out doors two hours a 



94: How We Breathe. 

day at the very least, and in fine weather let 
it be three or four. There is always some- 
thing to go out for. Every page of Nature's 
story-book is full of interest to her who will 
read it. The stones are always there to tell 
their sermons ; the everlasting hills, " whence 
cometh our help," are always there to remind 
us. that there is too much grandeur in Nature 
for man to waste Ins time on strife and con- 
tention ; and when the glad spring, summer 
and autumn days come, what a joy there is in 
studying the flowers, the ferns, the butterflies, 
the birds and all the fair living creatures that 
people the woods and fields. 

Not time ! do you say ? But, my dear 
child, think of the time you put into filling 
canvas with yarn, in a vain attempt to make 
something which looks like a flower. Had it 
not better bo spent in studying the flower it- 
self? Believe me, when you learn to study 
Nature's book with the loving heart and eye 
of an Agassiz, you will be so accustomed to 
the real air of life that you will wonder how 
women can be content to stay indoors and 
make "pretty things to wear," with a great 
many pounds of not only superfluous, but act- 



How We Breathe. 95 

naily ruinous (in more senses than one), ruffles 
and furbelows, when they can be so much 
healthier, wealthier, wiser and happier in sim- 
ple attire, whose modest hues are lighted by 
the glow of cheeks whose bloom rivals the 
rose's, and by eyes whose sparkle rivals the 
sunlight. 

Finally, keep your noses educated up to 
the requisite point for the recognition of an 
air unfit for breathing. For that purpose the 
sense of smell is given you, and when it tells 
you the air of a place is foul, get out of it as 
quickly as you can, unless there is some way 
of bettering it so as to fit it for respiration. 

I once heard Mr. Beecher tell a crowded 
audience in Steinway -Hall, New' York, that 
there was no subject- so much talked about 
and so little understood as the subject of ven- 
tilation, and that the air of that hall justified 
the assertion. He went on to say that, if we 
were asked to take into the mouth what had 
been once ejected from it, we should think it 
a very filthy thing ; but we do a much more 
filthy tiling when we take into our lungs not 
only the breath we ourselves have ejected, but 
that of our neighbors, too. 



96 How We Breathe. 

In the November, 1877, number of the 
"Popular Science Monthly" Dr. Felix Oswald 
has an interesting paper on " Modern Troglo- 
dytes," which you will do well to read. It 
will help to convince you that pure air and 
plenty of it, and large lungs in which to re- 
ceive it, are the essential elements of that 
beauty which you all covet, and which is found 
only in healthy bodies which have retained 
that likeness to their Maker expressed in the 
statement of the sacred historian, " So God 
created man in his own image." 



CHAPTEK VII. 

THE BRAIN AND NERVES. 

"Both in man and woman, the brain is the 
conservator of strength and the prolonger of 
life. Poor brains, like weeds, will grow on 
any soil. The best brains are built by educa- 
tion in accordance with the plans of Nature. 
A human brain is the " consummate flower " of 
Nature's development on this planet. No per- 
fect brain ever crowns an imperfectly developed 
body."— Db. Edwabd H. Clabk (" The Build- 
ing of a Brain"). 

In our previous studies we have considered 
the different organs of the body principally 
with reference to their individual functions. 
We come now to the consideration of the man- 
ner in which all these functions are coordi- 



98 The Brain and Nerves. 

nated so that a perfect harmony of action is 
secured throughout the entire structure. This 
harmony is the condition we call health, and 
the system of apparatus by the action of which 
it is insured we call the nervous system. 

There is no form of animal life in which 
this coordinator of animal force is wanting. 
True, its manifestations are exceedingly simple 
in the lower forms, but it requires only the 
slightest touching of the tentacles of the sea- 
anemone to reveal its sensitiveness; and if we 
follow up this contact with the microscope and 
patience, we shall find the little threads of 
nerves, radiating from their nervous centers, 
by whose action the creature is able to so co- 
ordinate its sensations with its motions as to 
withdraw its tentacles from the point of con- 
tact. And all this in a creature which spends 
its whole life on the rock where that life be- 
gan, and which looks so very much like a 
flower that it has received a flower's name ! 
If we rise a step higher, to the starfish and 
sea-urchin, we have not only no difficulty in 
proving that they have nerves and nervous 
centers, but we can easily find them without 
the microscope. So, if we pass from the radi- 



The Brain and Nerves. 99 

ates to the articulates, we shall find an even 
more elaborate system of nerves and nerve- 
centers, by which these creatures are rendered 
extremely sensitive, and also extremely motor, 
so that the bee and the butterfly are almost 
all motion. 

As we pass on to the vertebrates we find, 
first, a notable difference in the location of the 
nerve-centers as compared with the articulates, 
in that they are ranged along the lower or 
ventral region in the latter sub-kingdom, while 
all the vertebrates have their spines in their 
backs. Here, too, in the vertebrates we find, 
for the first time, a bony case for the lodgment 
and protection of nerve-centers ; hence they are 
the first to possess two quite distinct nervous 
systems, namely : the cerebrospinal or volun- 
tary system, and the sympathetic or involuntary 
system ; the former, as its name indicates, pre- 
siding over all voluntary action, while the lat- 
ter is confined to the regulation of such invol- 
untary acts as breathing, the beating of the 
heart, and the digestion of food. 

There is quite a marked difference in the 
tissue composing these separate systems, as you 
would easily see on inspection ; and their differ- 



100 The Brain and Nerves. 

ence in function is at once apparent when you 
recall the ease with which you open and close 
your eyelids, as compared with the difficulty 
of holding your breath for a few seconds. 

To the naked eye, the brain and spinal 
cord — which constitute the center of the volun- 
tary system, and which are lodged in the skull 
and in the long canal formed by the succession 
of openings in the body of the vertebrae, of 
which we spoke in an earlier lesson — are com- 
posed of two differently colored substances, 
which are called the white and the grey matter. 

Examined with the microscope, this matter 
is made up of fibers and cells, and micro- 
scopists have decided, after much careful study, 
that the cell portion alone is capable of gener- 
ating nerve force. Examined chemically, this 
matter is found to consist of more than three- 
fourths water; while the phosphates, of which 
we spoke in the opening chapter under the 
designation of the " dust of the earth," con- 
tribute largely toward the remaining fourth. 
In this revelation of chemistry, which is but 
one of many facts both useful and beautiful 
which that wonderful science reveals, we are 
fortified in the assumption contained in the 



The Brain and Nerves. 101 

chapter on Foods, that eggs and the whole 
grains, crushed into edible form, constitute the 
best brain food, in that chemistry teaches that 
the germs of all life, both animal and vege- 
table, are rich in phosphorus, the " light- 
bringer." 

If you look at the brain of any of the 
higher vertebrates (and any market will fur- 
nish you the opportunity), you will see that 
it is thrown into convolutions. In this respect 
the brains of reptiles and of birds differ from 
those of the higher vertebrates, in that the 
former have no convolutions, and this fact has 
much significance as related to the degree of 
intelligence; so that, although size is also an 
important factor, the brain of the civilized man 
being larger by nearly thirty per cent, than 
the brain of the savage, it is nevertheless true 
that anatomists rate intelligence quite as much 
according to the fineness of the brain convolu- 
tions as by the size of the organ : quality, not 
quantity, being the rule here as elsewhere. 

You may have observed heads with very 
prominent foreheads, or with excessive develop- 
ment upward, and possibly have been led to 
infer that their possessors had more than ordi- 



102 The Brain and Nerves. 

nary intelligence, but it is . probable that a 
closer acquaintance would fail to confirm jour 
assumptions. If you look at the heads of any 
ot the Greek statues — which are models, for all 
time, of the perfect human form — you will note, 
above all other characteristics, their perfectly 
exquisite symmetry, while their size often pro-' 
vokes the comment that the Greeks must have 
had small heads. 

"We have spoken, thus far, only of the 
nerve-centers. We have now to speak of the 
nerves which have their origin in these centers. 
From the brain and spinal cord there arise 
forty-four pairs of nerves, twelve of them from 
the brain and thirty-two from the cord. The 
cord itself is described as having four columns, 
two anterior and two posterior ; and the very 
interesting fact that each of the spinal nerves 
has a double root, one coming from an anterior 
column and being exclusively motor in its 
function, the other coming from the posterior 
column and being exclusively sensitive in func- 
tion, was never known until the present cen- 
tury, when Sir Charles Bell discovered it in 
1810, his discovery being "confirmed by Magen- 
die in 1822. Magendie divided, in the living 



The Brain and Nerves. 103 

animal, first the posterior roots, and found that 
sensibility was lost, but that motion remained. 
Then he divided the anterior roots, and ob- 
tained reverse effects. 

Knowing this fact, the series of actions 
which goes on between the fibers which go to 
make np any pair of the nerves which animate 
the trunk muscles or the muscles of the ex- 
tremities may be aptly likened to an exchange 
of messages between two telegraphic stations. 
The finger, for instance, touches an offending 
object. The sensitive fibers of the double- 
rooted nerve which animates the finger carry 
in the announcement to the central office, or 
spinal cord, that something hot is at the other 
end of the line, from whose proximity it will 
be expedient to withdraw. The order is at 
once issued to the motor fibers to attend to the 
withdrawal. This is the analysis of every vol- 
untary muscular action, and not only this, but 
the time occupied in the transit of the separate 
messages from without inward and from within 
outward has been estimated. 

"We turn now from the spinal nerves to the 
consideration of some of the twelve pairs of 
cerebral nerves whose origin is limited to a 



104 The Brain and Nerves. 

very small space at the base of the brain, and 
to whose presence we owe our special senses 
of smell, sight, hearing and taste in a similar 
way to that in which we derive sensation and 
motion from the spinal nerves. 

Says Gerald Massey : " There are many 
ways in which the Creator seeks admittance 
into the soul of man.... We see the flowers 
come to us every springtide, with messages 
uttered in lovely forms, and in fragrance which 
is the breath of the Divine. The winds blow, 
waters roll, the green leaves dance, the sun- 
beams brighten, the colors burnish into beauty, 
the weeds grow in grace, the skylark mounts 
up, and i deep calleth unto deep, day unto day 
uttereth speech ' ; the springing earth laughs 
out in the light, the starry heavens kindle all 
aglow with the glory of God.... All nature 
reflects in some faint wise, in its infinite variety, 
the Image of the Infinite One. It is as if in 
man Nature found her heart of hearts — her 
true meeting-place for the Creator, the Crea- 
tion, the Creature." 

And our five special senses may be regarded 
as the several gateways through which the 
Creator comes into our souls by these gracious 



The Brain and Nerves. 105 

manifestations of Himself. We are accustomed 
to call them five separate and distinct senses, 
yet closer thought suggests that the senses of 
smell, sight, hearing and taste are but so many 
modifications of the sense of touch, for do not 
the odorous particles which float off from the 
anthers of the rose impinge upon the terminal 
filaments of the nerve of smell, and by this 
contact give proof of their presence, as directly 
as the hot stove declares itself to the finger- 
tips through the general sense of touch ? 

Consider the sense of vision. Socrates 
asked : " Does it not look like a work of pre- 
science, because the eye is so delicate, to have 
furnished it with lids, which open when we 
want to see the light and close when we want 
to sleep ; to have fringed those lids with lashes, 
which, like a seive, strain the dusty wind and 
keep it from hurting the sight; and over the 
eyes to have placed brows, which, like eaves, 
carry off the sweat from hurting the sight ?" 

Let me entreat you, dear girls, to think of 
all this careful provision for the needs of your 
eyes, when you are tempted to hang a spotted 
lace veil before them to enhance the color of 
your cheeks, and forbear thus to profane and 



106 The Brain and Nerves. 

irritate these most delicate organs. You can 
hardly offend the nerve of vision more seriously 
than by following this pernicious fashion. Your 
brothers would, never endure such a thing as a 
veil before their eyes, but would protest against 
it with all possible vigor, and your eyes are 
made exactly like theirs. 

If you would see the mechanism of the 
eye — which is but the servant of the nerve of 
vision, sent off from the brain — you can easily 
get the eye of an ox from your market, and 
examine it at your leisure. Note through what 
a variety of media the light must pass before 
it is permitted to impinge upon that delicate 
expansion of the optic nerve which we call 
the retina ! Just as you saw that the mouth is 
the preparatory organ for digestion, the nose 
for olfaction, so you see that the eye is the 
preparer of light for the brain. Treat the eyes 
properly, and they will remain your faithful 
servants for all your threescore and ten years, 
provided you treat the rest of your body as 
you should. Abuse them, and there is no power 
in Heaven or on Earth which can prevent you 
from paying the penalty therefor. 

Do not hang veils before them ; do not 



The Brain and JVervcd. 107 

Lend over book or work, but sit always erect, 
and raise the book or work to the requisite 
height. Use an inclined book-rest for heavy 
books. Raise the eyes from the book as often 
as two or three times in the half hour, for a 
restful look off into the distance — " to the hills 
whence cometh our help," if possible — and let 
the mind have time to think of the subject- 
matter. Do not sit with the light opposite the 
eyes, whether that light be sun light or artifi- 
cial light, but let it fall over the left shoulder, 
directly upon the page or the work. ]^ever 
read or study by artificial light before break- 
fast. It is ruinous to the eyes. Do not read, 
or sew by twilight. If the eyes require protec- 
tion from sun-light or snow-light, or light re- 
flected from water, or if the lids fail " to sift 
the dusty wind," obscured glasses are better 
for the purpose of protection than veils. 

The sense of hearing has the ear for its 
servant, and of all the organs of special sense 
this is the most complicated and the most beau- 
tiful. It is impossible for me to convey to 
you, by words, any idea of this most marvelous 
structure ; but let me ask you to study a model 
of it at yuur first opportunity, and I feel sure 



108 The Brain and Nerves. 

you will thus find your whole soul so filled 
with reverence for the Maker of such a piece 
of workmanship that you will shrink from pro- 
faning its pavilion, as the external part is 
called, by punching a hole in it for the exhibi- 
tion of an ornament, which, however beautiful 
it may be, is a desecration to this " temple of 
the Holy Ghost." 

Keep these gateways for your Lord's in- 
coming ever open and ever in order ; so shall 
you live in that nearness to Him which the 
"pure in heart" know, "for they shall see 
God." Do this " in the days of your youth," 
so that when you reach your meridian your 
brains shall be richly stored with the records 
of the impressions which the servants of the 
nerves will have brought in. So shall your 
last days be better than your first. 

Dr. Draper tells us that " a shadow never 
falls upon a wall without leaving there an in- 
delible trace, a trace which might be made 
visible by resorting to proper processes. Upon 
the walls of our most private apartments, where 
we think the eye of intrusion is altogether 
shut out and our retirement can never be pro- 



The Brain and Nerves. 109 

faned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts, 
silhouettes of whatever we have done. 

" If, after the eyelids have been closed for 
some time, as when we first awake in the 
morning, we suddenly and steadfastly gaze at 
a brightly illuminated object, and then quickly 
close the lids again, a phantom image is per- 
ceived in the indefinite darkness beyond us. 
"We may satisfy ourselves that this is not a 
fiction, but a reality, for many details that we 
had not time to identify in the momentary 
glance may be contemplated at our leisure in 
the phantom. We may thus make out the pat- 
tern of such an object as a lace curtain hanging 
in the window, or the branches of a tree be- 
yond. By degrees the image becomes less and 
less distinct ; in a minute or two it has disap- 
peared. It seems to float away in the vacancy 
before us. If we attempt to follow it by mov- 
ing the eyeball, it suddenly vanishes. Such a 
duration of impressions on the retina proves 
that the effect of external influences on nerve- 
vesicles is not necessarily transitory. 

"In this there is a correspondence to the 
duration, the emergence, the extinction of im- 
pressions on photographic preparations. Thus, 



210 The Brain and JVerves. 

I have seen landscapes and architectural views 
taken in Mexico, developed, as artists say, 
months subsequently in New York : the images 
coming out, after the long voyage, in all their 
proper forms and in all their proper contrast 
of light and shade. The photograph had for- 
gotten nothing. It had equally preserved the 
contour of the everlasting mountains and the 
passing smoke of the bandit-fires. 

"Are there, then, contained in the brain 
more permanently, as in the retina more tran- 
siently, the vestiges that have been gathered 
by the more sensory organs ? Is this the ex- 
planation of memory — the Mind contemplating 
such pictures of past things and events as have 
been committed to her custody ? In her silent 
galleries are there hung micrographs of the 
living and the dead, of scenes that we have 
visited, of incidents in which we have borne a 
part ? Are these abiding impressions mere 
signal-marks, like the letters of a book, which 
impart ideas, to the mind ? or are they actual 
picture-images, inconceivably smaller than those 
made for us by artists, in which, by the aid of 
a microscope, we can see, in a space not bigger 



The Brain and Nerves. Ill 

than a pin-hole, a whole family group at a 
glance ? 

" The phantom images of the retina are not 
perceptible in the light of day. Those that 
exist in the sensorium in like manner do not 
attract our attention so long as the sensory 
organs are in vigorous operation and occupied 
in bringing in new impressions. But, when 
those organs become weary or dull, or when we 
experience hours of great anxiety, or are in 
twilight reveries, or are asleep, the latest appa- 
ritions have their vividness increased by the 
contrast, and obtrude themselves on the mind. 

" For the same reason they occupy us in 
the delirium of fevers, and doubtless also in the 
solemn moments of death. During a third 
part of our life, in sleep, we are withdrawn 
from external influences ; hearing and sight and 
the other senses are inactive ; but the never- 
sleeping Mind, that veiled enchantress, in her 
mysterious retirement, looks over the ambro- 
types she has collected — ambrotypes, for they 
are truly unfading impressions — and, combining 
them together as they chance to occur, con- 
structs from them the panorama of a dream. . . 

"Savage or civilized, we carry within us a 



112 The Brain and Nerves. 

mechanism which presents us with mementoes 
of the most solemn facts with which we can be 
concerned. It wants only moments of repose 
or sickness, when the influence of external 
things is diminished, to come into full play, 
and these are precisely the moments when we 
are best prepared for the truths it is going 
to suggest. That mechanism is no respecter of 
persons. It neither permits the haughtiest to 
be free from the monitions, nor leaves the 
humblest without the consolations, of a knowl- 
edge of another life. Open to no opportunities 
of being tampered with by the designing or 
the interested, requiring no extraneous human 
agency for its effect, but always present with 
every man, wherever he may go f it marvel- 
ously extracts from vestiges of the impressions 
of the past overwhelming proofs of the realities 
of the future, and, gathering its power from 
what would seem to be a most unlikely source, 
it insensibly leads us, no matter where we may 
go, to a profound belief in the immortal 
and imperishable, from phantoms which have 
scarcely made their appearance before they are 
ready to vanish away." — History of Conflict 
Between Science and Beligion. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

NERVES AND NERVOUSNESS. 

Haying considered the structure and func- 
tions of the cerebro-spinal or voluntary nerve 
system, it remains to speak more in detail of 
the great sympathetic or involuntary system, 
whose nerve-centers, or ganglia, have no bony 
case for their lodgment, and in this respect are 
allied to the nerve-centers of the radiates, the 
mollusks and the articulates, being distributed 
about among the various internal organs of the 
four cavities of the body, namely: the skull, 
the chest, the abdomen and the pelvis. Be- 
sides these, there is a double row of them 
lying against the anterior surface of the spinal 
column, which might be compared to a double 
string of loosely-threaded pearls, so far as the 



114 Nerves and Nervousness. 

appearance which they present to the naked 
eye is regarded. 

From these various ganglia, of which it is 
estimated there are upward of sixty in the 
heart alone, numberless delicate nerve fila- 
ments are given off from each internal organ, 
which unite not only with similar filaments 
from neighboring organs, but also with fila- 
ments sent off from the cerebro-spinal nerves; 
by which means you will understand that all 
the internal organs are not only intimately 
associated with each other, but also with the 
body which they inhabit. It is this fact which 
gives the name "Great Sympathetic" to this 
system. It is also called the " Great Organic," 
for the same reason. To the microscopist and 
the chemist the structure of this system pre- 
sents some significant variations from that of 
the cerebro-spinal system ; while to the physi- 
ologist there is a very wide variation in func- 
tion, in that a very much longer space of time 
is requisite for conveying impressions to its 
centers than is required to convey messages 
to the brain or spinal cord 

Thus, if the hand or foot come in contact 
with a cold or hot foreign body, the intelligence 



Nerves and Nervousness. 115 

is carried in to the brain in less time than it 
takes to describe the process even to the extent 
here attempted; but if we "catch a cold," as 
the expression goes, the sympathetic nerve- 
centers do not evince their recognition of the 
fact until twenty-four hours or more after the 
occurrence which gave rise to the condition. 

There is another very important fact con- 
nected with this sympathetic system, namely : 
that, although the entire weight of the internal 
organs is only about one-tenth that of the 
body, yet one-half of all the blood of the body 
is sent to these organs. I desire to impress 
this fact upon you with all possible emphasis, 
for upon its recognition your comfort depends 
in large measure. You will remember that in 
the chapter on " Circulation " I have endeav- 
ored to impress upon you the fact that physical 
suffering generally implies blood in the wrong 
place, and that all remedial measures point to 
a removal of it to some place remote from 
the seat of pain. 

Now you all understand that the nerves are 
the sentinels which report this want of equilib- 
rium in the circulation, by means of an ache 
of some kind. Not one of them will allow an 



116 Nerves and Nervousness. 

excess of blood in its vicinity without protest- 
ing; therefore, I say again, as I have already 
said to you, Keep the blood clean and in the 
right place, and your nerves will never give 
you painful reminders of their presence. 

All painful, inflammatory conditions, like 
pneumonia, dysentery, and uterine, or ovarian, 
inflammations, mean this and nothing more. I 
knew a young lady who stood with her head 
out of an open window for five minutes, in 
mid -winter, to gossip with a passer-by. In 
twenty-four hours she had the initiatory chill 
of pneumonia, and in a week the passer-by 
attended her funeral. 

I knew another, who played croquet on the 
damp ground in early May, going directly out 
from a warm dining-room, with thin shoes and 
but little protection from a cold wind. A 
violent attack of dysentery followed, from which 
she barely escaped with her life. 

Neuralgia has been defined as the "prayer 
of the nerve for healthy blood," but the nerve 
prays no less fervently for the right quantity 
than for the right quality of the vital fluid. 

Doubtless many of you have felt the pangs 
of neuralgia, and would like to be informed 



Nerves and Nervousness. 117 

how to avoid their recurrence. Let me tell 
yon, then, right here, that all the anodyne 
lotions and doses which ever were or will be 
compounded will never cure neuralgia as long 
as the cause of it remains, and, in nine cases 
out of ten, the cause of neuralgia in young 
women is traceable to want of equilibrium in 
the circulation. The poor body is so cramped 
and distorted and loaded down with the thou- 
sand and one devices for making it look " styl- 
ish, 5 ' that the blood has very hard work to get 
round it at all, to say nothing of getting round 
on time. 

Take the " corset-liver," for instance, as 
medical students have learned to call the livers 
of fhe female subjects which go to the dissect- 
ing-room. It is the rule, rather than the excep- 
tion, for these livers to be so deeply indented 
where the ribs have been crowded against 
them by improperly worn clothing, that the 
wrist may easily be laid in the groove. And 
this in an organ which is a mass of blood- 
vessels, through which every particle of blood 
ought to circulate freely on its way to the 
heart. Of course, it cannot get through the 
squeezed portions, and the inevitable result of 



118 Nerves and Nervousness. 

the half-done work of the liver is an unclean 
condition of the blood, which utters its cry by 
means of aching nerves. 

"A sick simpleton asks, What shall I take? 
A sick philosopher asks, What shall I do ? " 

"What shall I take for my nervousness?' 1 
is the question which comes daily, I might 
almost say hourly, to the physician — " that un- 
fortunate individual," as Voltaire said, "who 
is hourly expected to perform a miracle ; name- 
ly: to reconcile health with intemperance." 

All nervous people are intemperate in some 
respect, because they are deficient in that 
fundamental element of stability, self-control. 
There would be no need of any temperance- 
reform movements if we were all taught the 
proper lessons of self-control in childhood. The 
woman who stimulates herself to extra exertion 
on strong tea is just as much an inebriate as 
he who rolls in the gutter because he stimu- 
lates on alcohol ; and the young girl who never 
can pass a candy-store without indulging in her 
favorite sweets is just as surely on the road to 
ruin, of one kind, as is the boy who prides 
himself on being able to smoke cigars. The 
animal appetite is master in each case, and 



Nerves and Nervousness. 119 

self control is as deficient as in a creeping in- 
fant, who lias no higher thought than to eat 
as often and as long as it can. 

Inactivity ranks next to intemperance as a 
fruitful cause of nervousness. Some of " our 
girls' 1 are fond enough of activity of a certain 
kind. They can dance all night and " never 
feel tired," but they cannot walk a mile with- 
out getting the back-ache ; so they will shut 
themselves indoors all day, away from the life- 
giving air and sunlight, and read emotional 
novels, and then go to -the doctor to get some 
valerian for their nerves ! Alas ! poor souls ! 
If you would only go to the woods and to 
the fields, to the rocks and to the streams, for 
your books, and let the novels lie on the 
shelves till your mothers tell you which ones 
to read ! And then if you would spend your 
evenings with the best authors, and go to bed 
at nine o'clock, and do your dancing by sun- 
light, you would never know anything about 
nervousness. 

"Nervousness and hypochondria and hys- 
teria were unknown to the ancients. Perhaps 
if we emulate them, seeking to be as strong as 
the Romans, as high-minded as the Greeks, 



120 Nerves and Nervousness. 

they may in time be unknown to us." Grood 
muscles are the best possible balance for the 
nerves. People who use their muscles as they 
should never have hysteria. Nor yet do peo- 
ple who use their brains as they should have 
it. Well-directed mental effort never yet made 
a case of hysteria, nor of its relative, insanity. 
It is intemperate brain-work, with worry, which 
leads astray. 

In the annual reports of the Massachusetts 
Lunatic Asylums for 1876, the superintend- 
ents all concurred in asserting that "there can 
be no permanent decrease in the number of 
the insane till people learn to control their 
passions, sleep well, and ' keep cool.' 

" Children and older students must take ex- 
ercise, and the robust and vigorous must be 
taken from cruel exercise and sports, and put 
to study and more placid employments. Self- 
control is, above all things, essential. The 
marriages of those tainted with insanity should 
be forbidden. Brain- workers contribute a very 
immaterial percentage to the total number of 
the insane." 

It is a perfectly easy matter to select from 
a school of young ladies those who will be 



Nerves and Nervousness. 121 

liable to attacks of hysteria at the test exam- 
inations of the closing weeks of the term ; 
and they will not be those who have been 
"temperate in all things," and faithful not 
only to each day's mental work, but faithful 
also to the body, in which the mind dwells, 
as regards its daily need of sunlight, water, 
fresh air, and exercise. 

The intemperate ones are they who will, 
under the spur of some excitement, walk ten 
miles one day, and then stay indoors, wrapped 
in shawls and drinking tea, for a week after it. 
They will sit up all night to " cram " for an 
examination, when those who have done every 
day's work in its own good time are quietly 
refreshing their brains for the test -work by 
that best of all restorers — blessed, balmy sleep. 
The " crammers " will fidget and worry and 
make "great cry, but little wool," and when 
they are informed that they have fallen short 
of the mark they will fly off into hysteria like 
any poor crazy - brained creature. Then the 
opponents to the higher education of women 
come in and say, " I told you so ! That's 
what comes of cramming girls' heads full of 
Greek and Latin and science and all that 



122 Nerves and Nervousness, 

stuff, that's of no use to 'em ! Better let 'era 
stay at home and wash dishes !" 

Quite right! That kind of girls had bet- 
ter stay at home and wash dishes or darn 
stockings, so that they do it well, than to 
make such a pitiful pretense at braiu-work. 
JSTot what you do, but how you do it, is the 
test of your capacity. 

" Who sweeps a room, as by thy laws, 
Makes it and the action fine." 

The third factor, in addition to temperance 
and activity, which is requisite for healthy 
nerves is cleanliness, as applied not only to 
the body itself, but also to the air which sur- 
rounds it, and to the clothing which covers it. 
It is asserted by good medical authority that 
unventilated clothing tends greatly to aggra- 
vate rheumatic complaints by its retention of 
the acid excretions of the skin. All clothing 
should be frequently exposed to direct sunlight, 
as should the body which wears it. So should 
all bedclothing and beds be daily exposed to 
this most beneficent agent when clouds do not 
obscure it. 

It is considered by some a proof of a very 
neat housewife when all the beds are made 



Nerves and Nervousness. 123 

while the family are at breakfast; but to the 
physiologist there conld hardly be a more 
repugnant proof of untidiness. Indeed, I know 
of a lady who lives in a fine house where no 
window is opened from October till May. She 
has her bed made as soon as she and her hus- 
band leave it, and wonders what her neighbors 
can be thinking of to open their bedroom win- 
dows in midwinter. Her children have all 
died but one, and he is getting ready to go. 
He sleeps till nine or ten o^lock in the morn- 
ing, and always wakes with headache. He 
goes at once for mince-pie and jelly- cake, 
which are always at his command, and accom- 
panies them with sausage and doughnuts. His 
breath is simply horrible^ his complexion is 
like that of a withered and sickly old man, 
and he is a constant sufferer from neuralgia 
or headache. The blood of such a body is un- 
clean beyond comparison, and "there is no 
health in it." 

Let us hear what Mr. John Weiss says 
about the health of the " Women of Shake- 
speare " : 

" Shakespeare contrived to rear a race of 
women whose physical soundness was unini- 



124 Norms and Nervousness. 

paired. Before the gymnasium and health lift 
were invented by the peevish persuasion of 
dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches of 
fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school 
programmes, and ragouts of French novels, 
his women earned their health on horseback 
in the broad English fields; they called it 
down to them out of the sky where the hawk 
struck the heron and returned to perch upon 
the wrist ; they came upon its track in the 
sylvan paths which the startled deer extem- 
porized; they overtook it in long stretches of 
breezy walks upon the heathery downs and in 
the hawthorn - bounded lanes. The country's 
nature was their training-room, and its unso- 
phisticated habits their masters. 

" They saw the sun rise, and could not 
afford to outfiare the setting crescent with gas- 
light streaming from overheated rooms ; nor 
did the stately minuet ravage like the " Ger- 
man " which is sustained into the small hours 
upon rations of beef-tea and various liquors. 
They drank small-beer for breakfast, and knew 
the taste of herrings before the Turks invaded 
the nerves of Christendom with coffee and the 
Chinese began to tan its stomach with the acid 



JSTerves and Nervousness. 125 

of tea.... Not one of Shakespeare's women 
utters one line that is inspired by any form of 
hysteria; the perfect balance of the functions 
was not yet impaired, so that no nerve-center 
could exercise a petty tyranny, nor suggest 
the morbid fancies and curious superfluities 
which dedicate so many late romances to St. 
Yitus, the patron of spasm. .. .Nature was so 
prodigal of health to Shakespeare's women 
that it overflowed the clay-banks of their bod- 
ies, and spread in a freshet of gayety." 

Some of you have come to me with ques- 
tions about headache, about neuralgia, about 
nervousness, about sleeplessness, and so on, 
and often you ask me for " something to take" 
as if the doctor had only to put the hand in 
the medicine-chest and send a remedy direct 
to the seat of pain. My dear girls, let me tell 
you, once for all, that the medicines which 
cure all ills to which flesh is heir are found 
only in the advertisements. The true physi- 
cian effects more by his teaching than by his 
drugs. 

If you are suffering from headache, it is 
probably due either to errors in diet, or to 
fatigue, or to " a cold in the head," or to a 



126 Nerves and Nervousness. 

constitutional tendency to neuralgia, either in- 
herited or acquired. In either case the remedy 
is the same — rest. If the stomach has been 
offended by too much food or by too great 
variety (either will cause headache), by all 
means give it rest. Take a twenty-four-hour 
fast, and give Nature a chance to do her own 
repairing. She is mighty to prevail if you let 
her alone. We all incline to eat more than we 
need when the palate is pleased, and it is esti- 
mated that where one dies of starvation ten 
die by overfeeding. The Church of Rome 
does wisely by her children in one respect — 
as to the matter of stated periods of fasting. 
If the head aches by reason of nerve-fatigue, 
there is no remedy like sleep ; and the way to 
court sleep is to take a warm foot-bath and 
then firmly resolve to go to sleep. If the 
mind, owing to the temporary failure of the 
nerve-power to control its vagaries, tends to 
go roaming about in such crazy fashion as to 
repel the sleepy god, then is the time to sum- 
mon up your self-control. You can, if you will, 
make it stay at home and count sheep going 
over a wall ; or any other simple device by 



Nerves and Nervousness. \%1 

which it is kept steady will suffice to allay 
that restlessness which drives away sleep. 

Boswell tells us that a few days before the 
death of Dr. Johnson, when his physician ar- 
rived to pay his morning visit, lie seemed very 
despondent, and broke out in the words of 
Shakespeare : 

" ' Canst thou minister to a mind diseased; 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain; 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart?'" 

To which the physician replied, quoting from 
the same great poet : 

" ' therein the patient 
Must minister to himself.'" 

Johnson expressed himself much satisfied with 
the application. 

On another day, when talking on the sub- 
ject of prayer, the Doctor repeated from Ju- 
venal : "'Orandum est. ut sit mens sana in 
corpore sanoJ" 

Let us now briefly recapitulate the essen- 
tial conditions for Wealthy brains and nerves: 
First, be temperate in all things. Eat and 
drink such things only as will contribute to 



128 Nerves and Nervousness. 

the building of good blood, in accordance with 
the instructions already given you. Let, also, 
the times and the manner of taking the food 
be regulated in accordance with those instruc- 
tions. 

Be temperate in your observance of the 
proper hours of study and reading. Mental 
indigestion is just as sure to result from inor- 
dinate cramming with book-lore as is gastric 
indigestion sure to follow food-cramming. Be 
temperate in respect to your hours of waking 
and sleeping. Nature puts her flowers and 
her animals to sleep along with the going 
down of the sun, and no human being can 
disregard this example to the extent of turning 
night into day without, sooner or later, paying 
the penalty in shattered nerves. The best 
hours for sleep are those between ten and 
two, and no amount of sleep prolonged into 
the daylight can compensate for the loss of 
these precious hours. Be ready for bed at 
nine o'clock in the evening, and you will have 
no disposition to linger in bed after the sun 
rises. 

Be temperate and systematic in your ob- 
servance of hours of exercise in the open air, 



Nerves and Nervousness. 129 

and never, under any circumstances,, allow 
yourselves to study in the hour which should 
be devoted to exercise. Such study is a weari- 
ness to the flesh, and also to the brain and 
nerves. You have probably threescore and ten 
years to live, if you live as you should, and 
there is time enough to do all youi work well 
in that time. Do not endeavor to crowd just 
so many lessons into one term because your 
companion does so, but let each one be guided 
by her own individual capacities. Think now 
totally immaterial it will appear to you ten 
years hence whether you graduated with your 
own class or with the following one. 

Be temperate in your attention to personal 
adornings. Much valuable time is wasted upon 
personal attire. It is the duty of each one to 
always look just as beautiful as she can, and 
no young girl can fail to look beautiful if she 
is in perfect health, her entire apparel in per- 
fect order, her hair tidily and tastefully ar- 
ranged, her teeth and nails perfectly clean, and 
her dress made in the simplest possible manner 
consistent with the prevailing mode. The 
young girl who presents herself at the break- 
fast-table with half her hair in crimping-pins 



130 Nerves and Nervousness, 

and the other half in a frowsy state, her feet 
in shabby shoes or slippers, her dress half ad- 
justed, her collar arid cuffs, or ruffles, soiled 
and crumpled, and everything about her in 
disorder, can never appear beautiful to the 
eyes that behold her thus, no matter how much 
she may strive to adorn herself for the evening 
dissipation. Such a girl is sure to be intem- 
perate in her conduct of life. 

Secondly, he active in all good ways, if you 
would be free from neuralgia and nervousness. 
Idleness is no less the parent of hysteria than 
of other vices. People who lead busy lives 
never find time to have hysteria. Be active 
in the open air. The sun should never set on 
the day when you have failed to be out an 
hour or more in the open air, unless the weather 
is exceedingly inclement. Ladies of the pres- 
ent davr — thanks to the great improvement in 
outdoor attire — can go out in all weathers as 
perfectly secure from ill effects from exposure 
as their brothers can. 

We each must have a pound of oxygen per 
day to consume the waste matter whose accu- 
mulation in our blood causes neuralgia, and we 
cannot get it even in the best ventilated apart- 



Nerves and Nervousness. 131 

merits. We must go outdoors for it, or we 
shall pay the penalty of our neglect by despond- 
ency, by neuralgia, by hysteria, and perhaps, 
eventually, by insanity. 

Thirdly and lastly, be clean. Probably 
few, if any, of you are negligent of the use of 
soap and water to the extent of the ordinary 
demands of propriety ; but I have not failed to 
observe a disregard of the fact that cleanliness 
consists in constant vigilance. By this I do not 
mean that restless scrutiny which leads fussy 
housewives to be forever armed with the duster, 
the broom and the fly chaser, but I refer to 
that timely forethought which forbids us ever 
to incur the risk of leaving any accumulations 
of decomposing animal or vegetable matter 
where it can taint the air. 

I have seen young ladies allow the water 
to stand in vases of flowers until the air of the 
room was foul with emanations therefrom. I 
have noticed that young ladies who wear cor- 
sets often continue to wear them unwashed so 
long that the odor of the perspiration from the 
axillse announces their presence even before 
one sees them. These are but few of many 
little points of nicety in regard to our personal 



132 Nerves and Nervousness. 

habits the sum of which constitutes cleanliness. 

I need not remind you that if you engage 
in the occupation of street-sweeping as your 
voluntary contribution toward the sanitary good 
of the city, the skirts which you use for this 
purpose should be changed before you enter the 
drawing-room. You certainly would not invite 
the man who is hired to do this work into 
your parlor until he had first changed his 
clothes, and you certainly must be as untidy as 
he, even though yours has been a labor of love 
where his has been hired service. Of course, 
it is evident that each of you also needs to go 
to the bath as often as you engage in this 
occupation. 

The last cause of unclean blood of which I 
have to speak is that very common condition 
of the alimentary canal known as obstinate 
constipation. Ask any physician what he or 
she is oftenest called upon to treat among wo- 
men who wear corsets, and who spend much 
time in sedentary, indoor occupations, or in 
idleness, and you will find it to be this. It is 
the inevitable result of such lives, and the foul 
breath attending the condition is only one of 
many accompaniments, all of which combine, 



Nerves and Nervousness. 133 

at frequent intervals, to induce an aching head 
cr a violent attack of neuralgia in some one 
or more sets of nerves. Such people are good 
patrons of patent pills, and are never without 
them. Uncleanness is stamped upon every drop 
of blood, where such a condition prevails, and 
the only blood-purifiers for those who are thus 
afflicted are fresh air, with large lungs for its 
inhalation ; fresh water, with plenty of clean 
towels for rubbing the skin, and heroic doses 
of muscular exercise in garments which leave 
the diaphragm and all the muscles of the ab- 
domen as free to move as if the body had no 
covering but its own. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

HOW PLANTS AND ANIMALS ARE PER- 
PETUATED. 

We have confined ourselves, thus far, to 
the study of the individual life of different ani- 
mals. We come now to the consideration of 
the mode in which their succession is insured. 

Your observation of plant life, however lim- 
ited it may have been, has shown you that no 
plant, however simple its form or however 
humble its place on the pages of Nature's book, 
ever dies without having first matured some 
seeds or spores by which its type is destined 
to be maintained. Its whole life, whether it be 
long or short, points forward to this, its ulti- 
mate office. The delicate fronds of the ferns 
continue to grow in strength and verdure and 
beauty until their spore-cases mature, and then 



Plants and Animals. 135 

they droop and wither and return to the dust 
from which they came. So the violet and the 
anemone, the rose and the clematis, the aster 
and the golden-rod, and all the other bright 
attendants of the swift-going seasons, grow in 
grace and beauty until their seed-cups, or ova- 
ries, have matured, and with that maturing 
their lives begin to decline and they to tend 
downward to the sheltering arms of Mother 
Earth, from whose bosom they sprang and to 
whose bosom they return. 

As with the plant, so with the animal. 
The ovule of the former and the ovum of the 
latter carry the potential successors of the par- 
ent life. If the animal expels its ovum for a 
period before the young is matured, and keeps 
it warm in a nest with its feathers, as the bird 
does ; or leaves it in the sand, to be kept warm 
there, like the turtle ; or leaves it on the river 
bank, to be warmed by the sun, like the fish — 
it is said to be an oviparous animal: but if it 
carries its ovum in a uterus, instead of laying 
it in a nest, until its little one is ready to 
begin its visible existence, it is said to be a 
viviparous animal. All animals which bear 
their young alive are also called mammals, 



136 Plants and Animals, 

from the Latin mamma, a breast; because 
they all feed their young at the breast. Some 
mammals, like the whale and the seal, live in 
the sea, but most of the mammals are land- 
dwellers . 

Every form of infant life, whether that life 
be vegetable or animal, has its father and its 
mother; and in all cases, whether the infant 
life be that of a violet, a bird, or a child, its 
mother has the larger and more responsible 
share in the work of its maturing. To each 
one of you, dear girls, is assigned this holiest 
and highest of all human responsibilities, name- 
ly : the bearing and rearing of your own young, 
and to you each is assigned a special set of 
organs, separate from any of those we have yet 
studied, yet associated in very close relation 
to them by means of the " Great Sympathetic" 
nerve system of which we have already spoken. 

These organs, in mammals, are cilled the ovar 
ies and uterus. They are located in a cavity with 
firm, bony walls which we call the pelvis, or basin, 
and this cavity joins the abdomen. By a neglect of 
the laws of health touching these important organs 
the woman who is not in some way afflicted with 
a female weakness is the exception and not the rule. 



Plants and Animals. 137 

is true of the ovary of the mammal. Nothing 
could be more completely guarded from exter- 
nal injury than are these very important organs, 
as regards their location, encased as they are 
in the firm bones whose upright edges you feel 
when you rest the hands upon the hips. Those 
bones constitute the brim of the pelvis, or 
basin, in which the ovaries and uterus are 
lodged. 

The ovaries are about the size and shape 
of an almond, one on each side of the median 
line. They consist of a mass of very small 
ova, or eggs, much too small to be seen by the 
naked eye, each one of which is inclosed in a 
sac of its own, and at regular intervals, after 
you cease to be little girls, one of these little 
eggs is matured and escapes from its sac into 
the uterus. This is a hollow muscle, about the 
size and shape of a Bartlett pear, its longest 
diameter being two and a half inches. When 
you marry, the escaping egg is retained in the 
uterus and kept warm and alive until the little 
one inclosed in its investing membrane or shell 
is large enough to live separate from its mother. 
This is the process of reproduction as carried 
on throughout the entire animal world. 



138 Plants and Animals. 

The provisions for its maintenance are no 
less complete, nor any less adequate for the 
entire fulfillment of the work intended, than 
are the provisions for digestion, circulation and 
respiration, as already detailed. There is no 
more reason for your being sickly because this 
high privilege of maternity is accorded you than 
there is reason for the female portion of the 
rest of the animal world to be sickly : and we 
all know that the sickly females, as a separate 
class from all other created beings, are the 
human females. The original Eve, made in her 
Maker's image, and animated with His breath, 
was not a sick Eve ; yet she was made with 
just the same materials as you, had just the 
same number of bones, muscles, arteries, veins 
and nerves, and had just the same sets of or- 
gans, namely : the digestive, circulatory, respir- 
atory and reproductive organs. 

Alas ! how far have we fallen from this 
high ideal when we have to confess, as we 
must, that the woman who is not, in some way, 
afflicted with " a female weakness " is the ex- 
ception and not the rule ! Saddest of all is 
the fact that woman herself is responsible for 
this departure from God's plan. 



Plants and Animals. 139 

Hopeful to us all is the faet that she may, 
if she will, learn — nay, that she is seeking to 
lera — wherein she has erred, in order that she 
may become what God meant she should be: 
a companion for Adam, strong in her woman- 
liness as he is in his manliness; beautiful in 
her healthfulness as he is in his; and so, fit to 
become his help, meet for all good works. 

Some one says, "Nothing is so conducive 
to a right appreciation of the truth as a right 
appreciation of the error by which it is sur- 
rounded." We have been trying to study God's 
woman — the true woman. We are now to 
search for the causes of the diseases which 
years have heaped upon her since Eve sprang 
from the Creator's hand, in the perfect beauty 
of a healthy womanhood — a womanhood which 
is to-day, for the greater part, but an ideal in 
the mind of the poet, the painter and the 
sculptor. 

Said the Hon. Horace Mann: "I hold it 
morally impossible for God to have created, 
in the beginning, such men and women as we 
find the human race, in their physical condi- 
tion, now to be. Examine the book of Genesis, 
which contains the earliest annals of the human 



140 Plants and Animals. 

family. As is commonly supposed, it comprises 
the first two thousand three hundred and sixty- 
nine years of human history. With child-like 
simplicity this book describes the infancy of 
mankind. Unlike modern histories, it details 
the minutest circumstances of social and indi- 
vidual life. Indeed, it is rather a series of 
biographies than a history. The false delicacy 
of modern times did not forbid the mention of 
whatever was done or suffered. And yet, over 
all that expanse of time, for more than one- 
third part of the duration of the human race, 
not a single instance is recorded of a child born 
blind or deaf or dumb or idiotic, or malformed 
in any way. 

" During the whole period, not a single case 
of a natural death in infancy or childhood or 
early manhood, or even of middle manhood, is 
to be found. The simple record is, 'And he 
died ' ; or he died in a good old age and full of 
years; or he was old and full of days. No 
epidemic, nor even endemic, diseases prevailed ; 
showing that they died the natural death of 
healthy men, and not the unnatural death of 
distempered ones. Through all this time (ex- 
cept in the single case of Jacob, in his old age, 



Plants and Animals. 141 

and then only a day or two before his death) 
it does not appear that any man was ill, or that 
any old lady or young lady fainted. Bodily 
pain from disease is nowhere mentioned." 

Certainly it does not appear that any such 
array of "female' weaknesses" has ever dis- 
graced womankind in any age as characterize 
the women of this nineteenth century. 

Says Dr. Edward Clark, in his most sug- 
gestive and truthful book, "Sex in Education": 
"Let the statement be emphasized and reiter- 
ated until it is heeded, that woman's neglect 
of her own organization, though not the sole 
explanation and cause of her many weaknesses, 
more than any single cause adds to their num- 
ber and intensifies their power. It limits and 
lowers her action very much, as man is limited 
and degraded by dissipation. The saddest part 
of it all is, that this neglect of herself in girl- 
hood, when her organization is ductile and im- 
pressible, breeds the germs of diseases that, in 
later life, yield torturing or fatal maladies." 

Prominent among these maladies are dis- 
eases of the uterus, which involve its position. 
Only just so much space being assigned to it 
in the pelvis, if it is turned forward or back- 



142 Plants and Animals. 

ward or w to one side or to the other, there is at 
once a protest from the nerves of the adjacent 
organs in the way of pain. The prominent 
causes of these false positions are, first, the 
unnatural weight of the organ, which is the 
inevitable result of a mode of dress which 
forces too much blood to it; and, second, a 
flabby condition of its texture, which is the 
natural result of this habitual congestion. 

Not less common than false positions of the 
organ are unnatural conditions of the mucous 
membrane which lines it. It is the function of 
all mucous membranes, when in health, to se- 
crete enough mucus to keep the surface moist. 
As soon as this mucous membrane becomes 
unhealthy, this natural moisture increases to 
the extent known as a catarrhal discharge ; and, 
whether this discharge be a nasal or a uterine 
one, its character is the same and its cause the 
same, namely: congestion. This discharge, oc- 
curring from the uterus or from the vagina — 
which is the canal leading from the uterus — is 
called a leucorrhoea. If it occurs from the 
nose, it is called a catarrh. 

Prominent among ovarian diseases is the 
condition known as ovarian cyst, where one or 



Plants and Animals. 143 

more of the egg-sacs already spoken of become 
enormously distended with a fluid, because the 
ovaries have no mucous lining, like that of the 
nostrils, the uterus and the vagina, by whose 
help they can relieve their congestion; hence 
they become "dropsical," since they cannot 
become catarrhal. 

Each and all of these conditions, as we 
shall see, only express some constitutional de- 
rangement of organ or of function, induced 
by one or more of the following causes, as 
given by Dr. T. G. Thomas in his work on the 
u Diseases of Women " : 

" First — Want of fresh air and exercise, 

" Second — Improprieties in dress. 

" Third — Excessive development of the nerv- 
ous system and errors in education. 

" Fourth— Imprudence during menstruation. 

" Fifth — Imprudence after parturition. 

" Sixth — Prevention of conception and in- 
duction of abortion. 

u Seventh — Marriage with existing uterine 
disease." 

This is a concise and candid statement of 
the causes of a line of woman's diseases in 
whose treatment Dr. Thomas has won a world- 



144: Plants and Animals. 

wide reputation for success, and the women 
who daily crowd his office for treatment now 
are only so many confirmations of the state- 
ments above made. 

I have no desire, my dear girls, to appall 
you with any needless pictures of misery. I 
come to you only with timely warnings, if 
haply I may lead you to take my ounce of 
prevention rather than that you go blindly on 
in your disregard of the laws of health until 
you are compelled to take Dr. Thomas' pound 
of cure in the form of a pessary, or some inev- 
itable method of local treatment. This you 
must unavoidably come to if you persist in 
weighting down your pelvic organs witli long, 
heavy skirts hung upon your hips ; if you per- 
sist in compressing your chests with corsets 
or bands so that their contents crowd upon the 
abdominal organs, causing them to crowd, in 
their turn, upon the pelvic organs ; and if you 
disregard any or all of the other laws of health 
which I have tried to detail to you. 

"As in that which is above nature, so in 
nature itself, he that breaks one physical law 
is guilty of all. The whole universe, as it 
were, takes up arms against him ; and all mi- 



Plants and Animals. 145 

ture, with her numberless and unseen powers, 
is ready to avenge herself on him, and on his 
children after him, he knows not when nor 
where. 

" He, on the other hand, who obeys the 
laws of nature, with his whole heart and mind, 
will find all things working together to him 
for good. He is at peace with the physical 
universe. He is helped and befriended alike 
by the sun above his head and the dust beneath 
his feet; because he is obeying the will and 
mind of Him who made sun and dust and all 
things, and who has given them a law which 
cannot be broken." — Hev. Charles Kingsley 
("Health and Education"). 



CHAPTER X. 

HOW TO BECOME BEAUTIFUL. 

We have now studied the four separate 
Btories of the house we live in ; have learned 
something of the furniture contained in each, 
and have seen how perfectly each separate 
piece is adapted to its individual uses. We 
have also learned how all the four stories are 
brought into the most intimate relations with 
each other by means of the blood-vessels, which, 
like water-pipes which go all over the houses 
made with hands, permeate every cavity and 
every cell of this most complex structure. 

We have also learned that two very com- 
plicated nervous systems accompany and ani- 
mate these many-branched tubes, through which 
the life-blood circulates, by whose presence each 



How to Become Beautiful. 147 

department is kept constantly informed of the 
condition of things in all the other departments, 
so that no one organ or set of organs can suf- 
fer derangement without having the fact known 
all through the house. 

"And whether one member suffer, all the 
members suffer with it. And the eye cannot 
say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; 
nor, again, the head to the feet, I have no need 
of you." 

We can easily extend our comparison of the 
human body with the houses made with hands 
still further, and liken the blood-vessels to the 
water-pipes, and the nerves to the gas-pipes, 
for the nerves are indeed our light-bringers, 
in that all intelligence is due to them ; we 
shall then realize how entire is this mutual 
interdependence of all parts of the body. 

We might call the pelvis the basement 
story, for upon the organs contained in it rests 
the whole weight of the responsibility of the 
continuance of animal life. So might the ab- 
domen be likened to the cook rooms where 
rare and fine products are elaborated from raw 
materials ; while the thorax or chest may be 
likened to the drawing-room, where fair forms 



148 How to Become Beautiful. 

of thought and art are ventilated, and the head 
may fitly rank as an observatory. Now, we 
all know that if the basement story is not 
maintained m the most perfect order, the fact 
is sure to assert itself in the upper stories, and 
this is no less true of the houses " not made 
with hands " than of those which man fabri- 
cates, so that a headache is often referable to 
a wrong state of affairs in the pelvis ; indeed, 
this is one of the commonest causes of head- 
ache, and all the headache cures that ever were 
invented will avail you nothing so ltfng as their 
cause remains unsought and unheeded. 

But we have not yet covered our house, 
and it remains for us now to speak of the skin 
and its appendages. 

Let us first glance at the long array of ma- 
terials which Dame Nature has made use of 
with which to cover her creatures down in the 
lower ranks of Creation ! Note the firm, crusty 
skin which protects the soft coral insect, and 
remember that when you adorn yourself with 
this memento of a departed life you perpetuate 
the memory of these " Toilers of the Sea " as 
effectually as you immortalize your friend whose. 



How to Become Beautiful. 149 

hair is woven into the ornaments you most 

prize. 

- 

The pearl, too, which lends you its lustrous 
light, is but the secretion from the soft mantle 
of skin which invests the mollusk, whether he 
be oyster or mussel, and which is but the 
preface to his harder skin — his shell. So, too, 
the beetle and the bee have their crusty skins, 
some of them most gorgeously colored, as you 
know, far beyond imitation by man's device. 

Then there are the scales of the fishes ; the 
horny plates of the tortoise ; the feathery over- 
coat of the butterfly, the moth and the bird; and 
lastly, the woolly and hairy coats of the quadru- 
peds. What a bounteous storehouse of resources 
and materials is Dame Nature's workshop ! 

Let us now confine ourselves to the struc- 
ture and uses of our own natural covering. If 
you could look at a very much magnified verti- 
cal section of your skin, you would see a most 
marvelous array of apparatus for keeping you 
warm in winter and cool in summer, as well 
as for carrying off your waste material. What 
a network of minute blood-vessels is there 
spread out ! and how the bright tint of blood, 
which is all aglow with fresh air and sunlight, 



150 How to Become Beautiful. 

shines through the superficial layer of this won- 
drous structure ! No outward application of 
paint or powder can possibly compare in beauty 
with the natural color of a clean, healthy skin. 

Emerson says : " The lesson taught by the 
study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique 
and of pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all 
the research, namely : that all beauty must be 
organic; that outside embellishment is deform- 
ity. . . .The tint of the flower proceeds- from its 
root, and the lusters of the sea-shell begin with 
its existence." 

So thoroughly is your skin a part of your 
body that it reveals as infallibly the state of 
affairs within as it reports to your nerve- 
centers the temperature of the air and objects 
without, by means of the countless nerve termi- 
nals which are imbedded in its layers. This 
complicated network of arteries, veins and 
nerves is sustained in position by a foundation 
structure of cell tissue in comparison with whose 
delicacy and beauty your choicest laces are 
mere bungling imitations; while all around and 
about vein and artery and nerve are glands for 
collecting the perspiration, and tubes for carry- 
ing it off — tubes whose whole extent, taking 



How to Become Beautiful. 151 

the entire skin into account, is estimated at no 
less than twenty-eight miles, while the openings 
in the skin by which these drainage tubes dis- 
charge their contents upon the outside of your 
body number no less than three thousand fLve 
hundred and twenty eight to the square inch 
in the palm of the hand. Think of allowing 
this sewage to accumulate upon the body and 
its garments ! Can you wonder that filth and 
disease go hand in hand ? 

Besides all this array of tubes and nerves 
and fibers and glands there are the bulbs in 
which each individual hair has its origin, and 
into these bulbs there is poured the nicest of 
natural pomade, which is elaborated in little 
oil glands which are put there for this very 
purpose. A clean and healthy scalp will keep 
its own hair oiled without any aid from profes- 
sional hair-dressers, with rancid oils disguised 
by strong perfumes. 

And last of all is that fine array of tactile 
corpuscles, or little bodies of touch, by which 
we get that exquisite sensibility of the finger. 
tips which enables them to act as eyes for the 
blind. Look at your finger-tips, and note the 
ridges, which are quite apparent to the naked 



152 How to Become Beautiful. 

eye. Those ridges contain such numbers of 
these little bodies of touch that Meissner tells 
us he counted one hundred and eight of them 
in the space of about one-fiftieth of a square 
inch on the inner surface of the tips of one 
finger. 

The skin has its own muscles, too, by which 
it is capable of drawing itself up into little 
papillae — the condition known as " goose-flesh." 
You have seen horses curl up their skins to 
shake off the flies. Their skin muscles arc 
more highly developed than yours because they 
are no longer supplied with five fingers, what- 
ever may have been their condition in the ages 
gone by, and they are obliged to walk upon 
the tip of the one finger which remains to' 
them. 

Let us pass now to the consideration of the 
uses of all this mechanism. The physiologists 
have agreed upon quite an array of functions 
for the skin, namely : protection, secretion, ex- 
cretion, absorption, regulation of temperature, 
and general sensation. You have all realized 
the value of the skin as a protector if you have 
torn it away from the nerve sentinels which are 
so thickly stationed under its cuticle, and the 



How to Become Beautiful. 153 

bit of court-plaster, or otherwise, to which you 
at once resort, serves you kindly in that it acts 
as a temporary substitute for the lost cuticle 
while your vital forces make a new one for 
you. The functions of ^secretion and excretion 
have already been alluded to in speaking of 
the oil glands and sweat glands. The amount 
of the waste matter excreted upon the skin, by 
means of the twenty-eight miles of sewer-pipe 
already mentioned, varies between two and 
three pounds a day, according to the tempera- 
ture of the atmosphere. This fact is a sufficient 
argument in favor of a daily ablution of the 
whole body. 

The function of absorption is taken advan- 
tage of for the administration of medicines in 
the way of ointments, liniments, lotions, etc. 
Anointing or inunction is one of the most prim- 
itive methods of medication. Isaiah refers to 
oil as ointment in medical treatment. The 
Grecian athletes anointed themselves for their 
games. Homer, in the Odyssey, says : 

"Sweet Polycaste took the pleasing toil 
To bathe the prince and pour the fragrant oil." 

Juno, in the Iliad, anoints herself with " oil 
ambrosial sweet," and Yenus anoints the body 



154 How to Become Beautiful. 

of Hector with oil scented with roses. In the 
Roman baths of Diocletian anointing was car- 
ried to great perfection, and various spices — 
among them, cloves, cinnamon, lavender and 
roses — were used in the process. The rich had 
precious ointments, which they carried to the 
batli6 in small vials of alabaster. 

It is recorded that the emperor Hadrian, 
seeing a veteran soldier rubbing himself against 
the marble of the public baths, asked him why 
he did so. " I have no slave to rub me," was 
the answer. Upon which the emperor gave 
him two slaves and sufficient to maintain them. 
Another day several old men rubbed themselves 
against the wall in the emperor's presence, 
hoping to be favored in a similar manner, when 
the shrewd emperor, perceiving their object, 
directed them to rub one another. 

Modern practice favors the use of oils in 
fevers, especially scarlet fever, where the skin 
is parched, hot and dry ; and it is claimed that 
thorough inunction not only does not choke 
the pores of the skin, but actually encourages 
their opening, forcing the ointment through the 
outer skin and stimulating the absorbing ves- 
sels to take it up. 



How to Become Beautiful. 155 

If, then, the skin, by reason of its absorbent 
qualities, is capable of taking in what is deemed 
salutary for it, it is plain that it is no less ready 
to absorb obnoxious substances which may come 
in contact with it. This fact is a sufficient ar- 
gument in favor of frequent changes of the 
clothing which is worn next the person, and for 
its thorough ventilation ; also for a complete 
change at night from the clothing worn through 
the day ; also for the most thorough daily ven- 
tilation of the bed and its belongings — in short, 
for supplying it with the purest possible air at 
all times. 

To appreciate the fact that the skin is a 
regulator of temperature, we have only to re- 
call the discomfort of a hot, dry skin as com- 
pared with the relief afforded when a natural 
perspiration ensues, which, by the process of 
evaporation, speedily reduces the temperature 
of the whole body. We can also recall the 
lassitude of a hot summer day when the air is 
surcharged with moisture to such an extent 
that the evaporation from the body is checked, 
and we long to see the sun disperse the heavy 
clouds, so that our clouds may vanish, too, by 
the power of his upward attraction. 



156 How to Become Beautiful. 

That the skin is the seat of a most nice 
sense of touch needs no proof. It is even 
affirmed that the blind are able to tell colors 
bj this sense. 

We come now to the consideration of the 
hygiene of this most complicated texture. It 
will be plain to you at once that the same rules 
which govern the other parts of the body are 
also dominant here. The skin must have plenty 
of light, plenty of air and plenty of water to 
insure its health and its beauty. If it is kept 
perfectly familiar with these three essentials, 
the whole body will be full of light and air 
and comfort. Said Mr. John Quincy Adams, 
in his ninetieth year : "Men and women rarely 
ever allow the fresh air of heaven to touch 
any part of their bodies except their hands 
and face, and even to these the ladies are sys- 
tematically unjust by wearing gloves and veils. 
The surface of the beautiful human form re- 
quires to be for a certain period of every day 
exposed to the action of the atmosphere. I 
take my air-bath regularly every morning, and 
walk in my bedroom, in purls naturalibus> 
with all the windows open, for a full half hour. 
i also take a water-bath dailv. I read and 



How to Become Beautiful. 157 

write for eight hours a day. I sleep eight 
hours, and devote another eight to exercise, 
conversation, and meals. I feel in myself a 
reserve of bodily strength, which, I think, will 
carry me to a hundred years, unless I die by 
accident or am shot or hanged." 

Why should not the whole skin have its 
daily share of air and light and water ! "Why 
give it all to the skin of the face and hands ! 
Indeed, the amount of chronic hydrophobia 
(fear of water) which afflicts the human race 
is simply astounding, and goes far toward ex- 
plaining why they Buffer, in so many needless 
ways, from catarrh, bronchitis, fevers, " colds 
in the head," and rheumatism. You will never 
find that a person whose whole skin knows the 
daily luxury of an air and water bath is in the 
habit of " taking cold." 

The importance attached by the hardy Ro- 
mans to baths is evidenced by the number and 
magnificence of such establishments : that built 
by Diocletian accommodated three thousand at 
a time. Moses and Mahomet made cleanliness 
religion. Some one says that Dirt, Debt and 
the Devil make the Trinity of Evil. 

Says Dr. Playfair : " For a thousand years 



158 How to Become Beautiful. 

after the civilization of the Egyptians, the 
Jews, the Greeks and the Romans faded, there 
was not a man or woman in Europe that ever 
took a bath. Hence arose the wondrous epi- 
demics of the Middle Ages, which cut off one- 
fourth of the population of Europe : the spotted 
plague, the black death, the sweating sickness, 
and the terrible mental epidemics which fol- 
lowed in their train — the dancing mania, the 
mewing mania, and the biting mania. The 
monks made no little mischief, imitating the 
foul habits of the hermits and saints of early 
Christian times ; and the association of filth 
with religion led men to cease to connect dis 
ease with uncleanliness, and to resort to shrines 
and winking virgins for cures of maladies pro- 
duced by their own physical and moral impu- 
rities." 

It was an Arab motto, " Renew thyself 
daily. Do it again and again, and forever 
again." 

I suppose those "hermits and saints of 
early Christian times " were acting under the 
delusion that the more they mortified their 
flesh the more they deified the spirit; so they 
wore the hair-shirt until it was literally alive 



How to Become Beautiful. 159 

with vermin; and it was not until the advent 
of the Moors into Spain, with their Mahometan 
habits of cleanliness, that Christian Europe 
learned the mistake it had made in so falsely 
interpreting the religion of Jesus. Indeed, it 
appears that modern Christianity has so largely 
occupied itself with the idea of self-chastisement 
that it has almost lost sight of the joy and 
sweetness which flow through all the life of 
Jesus, just as the old painters put only sorrow 
and suffering into their pictures of him, with 
never a trace of the joy which he must have 
known by the very consciousness of his own 
purity. In this spirit painted Guido Reni, 
who, it is said, actually stabbed the man who 
sat for his picture of Christ, in order that he 
might most vividly portray the agony which 
he, in common witli all the old masters, made 
the dominant characteristic in the face of him 
who came to inaugurate the kingdom of love, 
joy, and peace. And so, to-day, the nearer a 
people are to the darkness and the errors and 
the gross superstitions of the Middle Ages, the 
less do they appreciate the good that lies all 
about us in the abundant outflowing of God's 
free air and water and joy-giving sunshine. It 



160 How to Become Beautiful. 

is pitiful to note this in the large cities, where 
the degraded victims of the poverty which al- 
ways goes hand in hand with ignorance and 
vice herd together in dens of darkness which 
reek with filth. 

During a practice of several months in one 
of the New York dispensaries, where the poor 
get plenty of medicines and plenty of prescrip- 
tions from newly -fledged doctors, "without 
money and without price," I was again and 
again shocked, not only by the fear of water 
which prevails among this class of misguided 
beings, but also by the immense doses of medi- 
cine which they require to enable them to live 
without air and water. As a rule, they don't 
want any advice about living so as to get along 
without medicine, and they estimate the med- 
ical skill of their adviser by the amount of 
medicine given. No medicine, no brains! 

I remember a very filthy woman who used 
to come every Saturday for pills. All the 
accumulated filth upon the surface of her body 
would defy description. As it was in the heat 
of midsummer, I ventured to propose that she 
take fewer pills for the inner self and more 
water for the outer self. In short, I copied 



How to Become Beautiful. 161 

Mr. Dick's prescription for little Davy when 
his aunt Betsy Trotwood asked, "What shall 
we do with him |" " Wash him !" I wish 
there were any words by which I might pict- 
ure for you the expression with which she 
asked me, "What! all over?" She then in- 
formed me that she had never done such a 
thing in her life, and should be ashamed to 
tell of it if she had. Medicine she must have. 
God's pure air and water and sunshine she 
was afraid of. I think I succeeded in getting 
the whole of that filthy body washed by in- 
ducing her to take it by installments. I gave 
her a half dozen powders of carbonate of soda ? 
told her to dissolve one in a basin of water 
and apply externally until the whole body was 
thus medicated. The medicine (!) induced her 
to try this plan of ablution. 

You will, perhaps, say this is an exagger- 
ated case; but I assure you "such things are 
common." Even in my intercourse with young 
ladies in schools, to whom I advocate the daily 
ablution of the entire surface of the body, I 
am frequently met with the objection, " I can- 
not 6pare the time." And this, when five min- 
utes are all that are required. A basin of 



162 How to Become Beautiful. 

cold water, where the bath -tub is wanting^ 
and two clean towels, with brisk action of 
the hands and arms, are all that are required. 
Let the whole person be denuded at once, 
and in cold weather let the work be done as 
briskly as possible. The tonic influence of 
such a bath in the morning (for the morning 
is the time for the cold bath, warm baths 
being indicated only at bedtime) will last all 
through the day, and is the best possible safe- 
guard against " taking cold." If you are obliged 
to have a room-mate, a little ingenuity will en- 
able you to improvise a screen. I hope the 
time will come when the putting two girls 
into one bed and one dressing-room will be 
recognized as an injustice to each. The pres- 
ent practice in boarding and other schools, in 
this respect, is pernicious. 

Let it be understood that in giving these 
directions to young girls for daily ablutions in 
cold water, I assume that I address those in 
health. Invalids must remember that the fam- 
ily physician must be their guide in -this mat- 
ter. • 

An emphatic proof of the danger of stop- 
ping up the pores of the skin is afforded in 



How to Become Beautiful. 163 

history by the case of the child whose skin 
was gilded to represent the golden age at the 
brilliant fete which celebrated the election ot 
Pope Leo the Tenth. The child died in con- 
sequence of the application. Foucault, a French 
experimenter, covered animals with a coat of 
varnish. They died more quickly than if the 
whole skin had been removed. Horses had 
catarrh, dogs had congestion of liver and in- 
flammation of bowels, and all died in convul- 
sions. 

Think of this, dear girls, when you are 
tempted to follow the example of those mis- 
taken mortals who apply paints and powders 
and enamels to the face in order to appear 
beautiful (?) in the eyes of men. The late Dr. 
Edward Clark, in his most truthful book on 
" Sex in Education," has given you all the 
help }'ou need to become beautiful, as follows : 

"'When one sees a godlike countenance,' 
said Socrates to Phsedrus, 'or 6ome bodily 
form that represents beauty, he reverences it 
as a god, and would sacrifice to it.' From 
the days of Plato till now all have felt the 
power of woman's beauty, and been more than 
willing to sacrifice to it. The proper, not 



164 How to Become Beautiful. 

exclusive, search for it is a legitimate inspira- 
tion. The way for a girl to obtain her por- 
tion of this radiant halo is by the symmetrical 
development of every part of her organization 
— muscle, ovary, stomach, and nerve — and by 
a physiological management of every function 
that correlates every organ ; not by neglecting, 
or trying to stifle or abort, any of the vital 
and integral parts of her structure, and sup- 
plying the deficiency by invoking the aid of 
the milliner's stuffing, the colorist's pencil, the 
druggist's compounds, the doctor's pelvic sup- 
porter, and the surgeon's spinal brace." 

" What is good for pimples ?" 

Water and work. Pimples indicate that 
there is an excess of something in the blood 
which the internal organs of excretion have 
been unable to dispose of, and they have called 
in the excretory power of the skin to their 
aid. If you take very little exercise and live 
indoors, it follows that you must also take 
very little food. You know what the result 
is if you keep putting coal on the fire and neg- 
lect to open the draughts. There can be no 
life in the grate nor in your body unless oxy- 
gen is supplied to each in proportion to the 



How to Become Beautiful, 165 

carbon which is brought in. Your candies and 
sweetmeats are so much carbon, and you need 
a pound of oxygen per diem to burn up your 
carbon. In order to make sure of this daily 
pound of oxygen you must make your mus 
cles work in the open air. Take long, vigo- 
rous walks, and let the sun shine on you with 
his life-giving power. Find useful work to 
do! 

Said an eminent Western lawyer, writing 
upon the subject of health reforms and reforms 
in general : " If I had supreme power, or could 
give one direction which should be followed, 
and would, in my judgment, do more than 
any other one thing to reform the world, and 
especially young ladies, I would say, 'Work!' 
I mean manual labor. Every man, woman 
and child should work. It is the idle ones 
who become the wicked ones. I do not rec- 
ollect ever to have seen a downright indus- 
trious man or woman who was very bad; and 
it seems to me that a reform in this direction 
is more needed in the United States than any- 
where else. All the American youth are con- 
triving how to get a living without work, 
under the silly notion that work is disgraceful. 



166 How to Become Beautiful. 

How clearly I can see that the Germans in 
this country are getting ahead of the natives! 
They pay their debts, and their families are 
almost all in comfortable circumstances. It is 
because they are willing to work. 

"It seems to me that there is another de- 
cided defect in the bringing up and education 
of girls; and that is, that they are too super- 
ficial. They canter over a great variety of 
studies, get a smattering of each, and nothing 
is thoroughly mastered. ' To get on in life J 
means to be so much the master of your art 
that you make it for the interest of the world 
to employ you." 

And he is right. Happy is it for each one 
of you who is dependent upon her own exer- 
tions for a maintenance. Work is the best 
of tonics and the best of beautifiers. The list- 
lessness, the sallowness and the shallowness of 
her who has nothing to do but to try to look 
pretty are pitiful to contemplate. No less are 
you happy who, though not dependent upon 
your own labor for maintenance, have sought 
and found ways of work which call out your 
best powers. You are both out of danger of 
rusting, and, in large degree, you are out of 



How to Become Beautiful. 167 

danger of falling " into the hands of the physi- 
cian," as we read that he shall do " who sin- 
neth against his Maker"; for it is the idl2, 
and not the industrious, who are prone to vice. 
And all these principles of ethics are directly 
applicable to the question in hand. A lazy 
skin, which lacks the stimulus afforded by act- 
ive exercise and by daily contact with air and 
water, is sure to be the pimpled and blotched 
skin. 

" What makes freckles, and how may we 
get rid of them V 

Freckles are sun-spots, and the more act- 
ively you make the skin work and perspire 
the sooner they will disappear. Do not shut 
yourselves away from sunlight for fear of them. 
The best complexions are often the most sensi- 
tive to these sun-impressions, and you had far 
better wear a freckled skin than to look like 
the cellar potato-sprout, lank and pale and un- 
comely, for lack of sunlight. 

" What are moth-patches, and what can one 
do for them ?" 

Moth-patches are allied to the fungi which 
one sees on the north side of buildings, where 



168 How to Become Beautiful. 

the sun never shines. " Walk in the light " 
for them ! 

"What will make the hair grow?" 
Water and air and light. The hairs are 
but so many appendages of the skin, and their 
health and vigor and luxuriance depend upon 
its health and vigor. Any excess of artificial 
applications to the head, which deprive its skin 
of air and light, lessen its vigor, and so tend 
to hasten the decay of its hairy covering. The 
head should be kept just as clean as the rest 
of the body, and the hair should have its ends 
clipped as often as once a month, else it soon 
comes to resemble the lawns which know not 
the lawn-mower. 

Masses of dead women's hair, or of jute, or 
any foreign substance which heats and burdens 
the head, are not favorable to the health of 
the hair. It is marvelous how little regard is 
paid, as a rule, by young ladies to the style 
of the individual head and face in the choice 
of the style for the arrangement of the hair. 
A new style comes into vogue, and all at once, 
like a flock of sheep following the leader — 
the long-faced and the round-faced, the thin- 
faced and the wide-faced, the high-headed and 



How to Become Beautiful. 169 

the flat-headed, the big-headed and the little- 
headed — rush to adopt it, utterly regardless of 
the question of fitness. I beg you, if you be 
lacking in a sense of the fitness of things, to 
choose from among your friends her who is 
most truthful and most competent to counsel 
you in this matter, and, above all other con- 
siderations, I pray you to put that of tidiness 
of arrangement first and foremost. 

Finally, to quote once more from Mr. Eur 
erson on Beauty : "It is a rule of largest ap- 
plication, true in a plant, true in a loaf of 
bread, that, in the construction of any fabric 
or organism, any real increase of fitness to 
its end is an increase of beauty" 

Also upon Behavior : " I have seen man- 
ners that make a similar impression with per- 
sonal beauty ; that give the like exhilaration, 
and refine us like that ; and, in memorable ex- 
periences, they are suddenly better than beauty, 
and make that superfluous and ugly. But they 
must be marked by fine perception, the ac- 
quaintance with real beauty. They must al- 
ways show self-control : you shall not be facile, 
apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word ; 
and every gesture and action shall indicate 



170 How to Become Beautiful. 

power at rest. Then, they must be inspired 
by the good heart. There is no beautifier of 
complexion, or form, or behavior, like the 
wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around 



us." 



CHAPTEK XI. 

THE USES AND ABUSES OF DRESS. 

" The first purpose of clothes was not 
warmth or decency, but ornament. . . .The sav- 
age found warmth in the toils of the chase, or 
amid dried leaves in the hollow tree, in his 
bark shed, or natural grotto ; but for decora- 
tion he must have clothes. Nay, among wild 
people we find tattooing and painting even 
prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of 
a barbarous man is decoration, as, indeed, we 
still see among the barbarous classes in civil- 
ized countries. . . .Clothes, which began in fool- 
ishest love of ornament, what have they not 
become to us ! ... . Clothes gave us individuality, 
distinctions, social polity. Clothes have made 
men of us ; they are threatening to make 



172 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

clothes-screens of U6." — Thos. Oarlyle ("Sar- 
tor Kesartns"). 

Since man is the only wearer of artificial 
clothing — his natural covering being generally 
conceded to be insufficient for his needs — he 
has the privilege of choosing his extra suits 
from among the wardrobes of all the animals 
below him in the scale of creation. Looking 
about in his own sub-kingdom — that of the 
vertebrates — he finds little, if any, use for the 
scaly suits of the fishes, nor can he appropriate 
the feathered suits of the birds to any extent 
beyond that of ornament. Thus he finds him- 
self, for the most part, restricted to the hairy 
and woolly quadrupeds for the materials which 
are destined to supply the deficiencies in his 
wardrobe. 

History, in the records it gives us of the 
early Christian monks, tells us that Thomas 
a-Becket, and others like him, wore the hair- 
cloth 6hirt until it was a loathsome mass of 
vermin ; that this example was imitated by the 
common people ; and that the Saracens, about 
the eighth century, were the first to introduce 
into Europe "the often - changed and often- 
washed undergarment, which still passes among 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 173 

ladies under its old Arabic name" (Dr. Dra- 
per). 

Under such circumstances it is easy to see 
that the chemise was a godsend ; but ten cen- 
turies have brought us a step further, and to- 
day the best-dressed woman is not the woman 
who wears a chemise. That garment has had 
its day. Reason and common-sense alike reject 
it and the hair-cloth garment which it super- 
seded, while they substitute for its bagginess a 
neat and comely-fitting garment of wool which 
covers the entire body as if it grew there. It 
is not, like the chemise, gathered up into a 
superfluous mass of drapery round the waist, 
whose dimensions that garment needlessly in- 
creases ; it is not, like it, forever slipping off 
one shoulder ; and it does not, like it, leave the 
body exposed to the harsh vicissitudes of cli- 
mate. On the contrary, it is everywhere adapt- 
ed and fitted to the form ; it cannot slip off 
one shoulder, for all hygienic laws require that 
the whole body be uniformly covered, the 
shoulders just like all other parts, and it 
shields us from sudden climatic changes as 
tenderly as it did the lambs from whose fleeces 
it came. The best thought of the day has been 



174 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

devoted, in large measure, to this reform in 
woman's under-clothing, as well as to one in 
her outer clothing. 

For years the gentlemen physicians have 
been uttering their protests against the abuses 
which woman was heaping upon her body by 
means of her errors of dress. What I have in 
previous chapters quoted to you from Dr. Wil- 
lard Parker and Dr. T. G. Thomas, of New 
York, and from the late Dr. Edward H. Clark, 
of Boston — three names among the highest in 
the medical profession — are but a few of the 
many emphatic utterances upon this point. 

But what could they do more ? They never 
had to wear the abominable gear, and of course 
they were incompetent to criticise or amend it 
in detail. They could only reiterate, in a help- 
less way, what our gentlemen professors in the 
Woman's Medical College used to say as often 
as a woman came to the clinical lecture to be 
examined for chest or other diseases which re- 
quired her disrobing, " Why will women tie so 
many miserable strings round their bodies !" 

Meanwhile, the world was moving, and it 
had come to see that a man doctor was not 
good for much unless he was a good nurse. 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 175 

So it finally came to think it possible that, 
since women were very good nurses without a 
medical education, they might be still better 
nurses with such an education, and the women 
began to go to Medical College. It only re- 
quired one look at the internal mechanism of 
their bodies in the dissecting-room to show 
them the inevitable results of putting strings 
or bands or bones around these bodies ; and so, 
little by little, out of their convictions, added 
to those of earnest, thinking women in Boston, 
there grew the dress-reform movement, which, 
like many other lights which rose in the East, 
has spread across the continent even to Cali- 
fornia, shedding its beams abroad in all the 
prominent cities of New England and many of 
the Western cities. 

In New York city it has its headquarters 
only next door to that emporium of fashion, 
Madame Demorest's establishment, so that it 
really begins to look as if Fashion herself was 
preparing to become hygienic, and so common- 
sensible. 

The principles of this reform are natural 
principles, and are concisely stated as follows: 

" First — That the vital organs in central 



176 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

regions of the body should be allowed unim- 
peded action. 

" Second — That a uniform temperature of 
the body should be preserved. 

" Third — That weight should be reduced to 
a minimum. 

" Fourth — That the shoulders, and not the 
hips, should form the base of support." 

Soon after the inauguration of this reform 
the prominent thinkers among the women of 
Boston and New York co-operated in arrange 
ing for a course of free lectures upon " The 
Effect of Misapplied Clothing upon the Health 
of Women," to be given by women physicians, 
simultaneously, in the two cities. The leading 
churches in both cities were placed at their dis- 
posal, and the press reported the lectures at 
length in the daily papers. 

Thus was the leaven introduced into the 
immense lump of prejudice which still blinds 
the eyes of so many, many women. Some one 
has said, " There is nothing so painful to hu- 
man nature as the pain of a new idea ; it is, as 
the common people say, ' so upsettinV " You 
remember how I " upset " the woman at the 
dispensary to whom I ventured to suggest an 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 177 

external application of soap and water to her 
entire person. I have to confess to you, even 
now, that it is almost as " upsettin' " to a 
woman to ask her to give up her chemise and 
drawers for a single, whole garment, which has 
all the uses and none of the abuses of the two, 
as it was to that poor woman to be asked to 
take a bath. 

Yet I do not lose my faith in the ultimate 
success of the movement. All reforms must 
pass through at least three periods on their 
way to acceptation, namely: the stage of rid- 
icule, the stage of abuse, and the stage of in- 
difference. 

Mr. Emerson, in his essay on Beauty, says : 
"Many a good experiment, born of good sense, 
and destined to succeed, fails only because it 
is offensively sudden. I suppose the Parisian 
milliner, who dresses the world from her im- 
perious boudoir, will know how to reconcile 
the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, 
and make it triumphant over Punch himself, 
by interposing the just gradations." 

Surely, ten centuries for the chemise is a 
warrantable gradation to its successor, the com- 
bination garment, which, in its varied nomen- 



178 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

clature of " chemiloon," " chemilette," and 
"chemille,'' still retains enough of its Arabic 
etymology to give it the dignity of age. Nor 
is it by a sudden leap that we have come to 
this happy combination. The first gradation 
from the chemise toward it is to be found in 
the "pantalettes," which less than half a cen- 
tury ago were the only coverings worn by 
feminine legs, in their individual capacity, ex- 
cept the hose. These bantam-chicken attach- 
ments were tied around the leg, below the 
knee, by a string which fastened both them 
and the stocking, leaving the entire surface of 
the extremities from there to the waist ex- 
posed, except so far as the curtains hung about 
them, in the form of chemise and skirts, offered 
a show of protection. Think of wading through 
snow-drifts in that attire ! Yet women did so, 
and it was considered quite the proper thing. 
The next gradation was from " pantalettes " to 
drawers, which are fastened about the waist by 
a band or a string, and which are now the rule 
in the feminine wardrobe, where they were 
the exception a quarter of a century since. In- 
deed, they are still the exception in some parts 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 179 

of Germany and in secluded country towns in 
the United States. 

Now, all that the dress-reform aims at is 
to combine the chemise and drawers in one 
garment which shall cover the body and its 
extremities like another skin, and thus dispense 
with any bands or strings either about the ex- 
tremities or the body. By this means all su- 
perfluous folds about the waist are dispensed 
with, and thus its symmetry is preserved. Fur- 
thermore, all the interference with the circu- 
lation of the blood through its various channels 
is avoided; for it is impossible for this to go 
on as it should in any body which is girt about 
by bands, or whose extremities have strings 
tied about them tightly enough to keep either 
the hose or any other garments adjusted. An 
additional inducement to those who regard 
economy is the securing of one " piece," in 
place of two, for the laundry. 

This one principle is adhered to in all 
the undergarments and in all the overgarments 
of the reform costume, namely : the unity which 
dispenses with waist-bands, instead of the dual- 
ity which renders them indispensable, and thus 
puts restrictions upon that most important of 



180 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

all muscles, the diaphragm. It asks you to do 
nothing, by way of change in costume, which 
shall make you grotesque, or even conspicuous, 
among your companions, except in the results 
which are sure to follow its adoption, by way 
of a fresher bloom on your cheeks, or clearer 
light in your eyes, and greater vigor to your 
whole carriage, than they can ever enjoy who 
persist in fettering themselves in ways which 
have proved, beyond all question, pernicious. 

Of the close-fitting undergarments, there 
may be one of wool, worn next the person, ot 
light and airy quality for summer, and of close, 
warm texture for winter. Over this may be 
worn a second, of cotton or linen, which can 
be ornamented at your discretion, and which 
can be so neatly and elegantly fitted to your 
person as to more than compensate you for 
the relinquishment of that instrument of tor- 
ture and bane of woman's health — the corset. 
Hygeia, the goddess of health, admits no such 
foe to health as this into her wardrobe. There 
was a time when this horrible structure was 
even applied to babies and little girls. That 
day has passed, and, as a rule, modern mothers 
are accustomed to dress their little girls in 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 181 

accordance with the requirements of health, 
and so in accordance with the design of the 
dress-reform. Let the world rejoice and take 
hope in the fact that some of them already see 
that the grown girl needs to make no change 
in the mode of applying her clothing when she 
steps from childhood to womanhood. 

So much for the general principles relating 
to undergarments. For further details and for 
patterns you are referred to the various agen- 
cies already established in our principal cities. 
That in Boston is at 2-J- Hamilton place. That 
in New York is at 6 East Fourteenth street. 
Other addresses or patterns may be obtained 
from these sources. 

We ccme now to the consideration of the 
outer garments. Here the question is largely 
one of ornamentation ; for the claims of com- 
fort and decency are, for the most part, satis- 
fied by the system of undergarments already 
advocated. 

" We must have poetry and art in woman's 
dress; but poetry and art are never at odds 
with common -sense and vigorous health.... 
Fashion must be respected, so far as the pain- 
ful impressions produced upon the eye by 



182 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

• marked and obvious departures from her arbi- 
trary rules ; but fashion is seldom a good physi- 
ologist." — New York Tribune. 

The hygiene of dress does not demand the 
renunciation of drapery. The artistic eye will 
not yet accept even the masculine statue in 
trowsers, as proved by the outcry against the 
statue of Mr. Lincoln in the Union Square 
park, New York, and others of similar angu- 
larity, elsewhere located. Much less, then, will 
it tolerate either the feminine statue or the 
feminine personality divested of all the grace 
which it has come to associate witli u robes 
loosely flowing." It only asks woman to bring 
her reason and her common-sense to her aid 
in the matter of the selection and adjustment 
of her attire, in conformit}^ with the following 
considerations : 

First, health. I cannot do better here than 
to call your attention to a sensible little manual 
entitled " Hints on Dress," by Ethel C. Gale, 
published in 1872 in the Putnam's "Handy- 
Book " series. This is what she says on the 
corset subject, under the health consideration : 

" The idea that a disproportionately small 
waist is beautiful is one of the immature and 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 183 

epidemic fancies of sweet sixteen. Once let it 
enter a school, and, in spite of physiology and 
the teachers, it spreads like the measles. Said 
an elderly gentleman one day, ' Where do the 
girls get such perverted notions of beauty? 
Here were my own daughters, never were 
taught anything of that sort at home, but when 
they returned from school they were drawn up 
in packs of torturing bones, till they looked as 
pinched and starved as weasels. Couldn't walk 
forty rods without fainting ; couldn't take a 
long breath; couldn't laugh; couldn't do any- 
thing but look as miserable as if they were on 
their way to the gallows ! I told the girls I'd 
disown 'em if they didn't take the things oif ; 
and so they did, and soon looked like them- 
selves again.' " 

Here follow some pertinent suggestions con- 
cerning the clothing of the feet, which you will 
do well to read and heed. There has been 
such a marked improvement in the matter of 
women's foot-attire during the last decade that 
they are inexcusable, to-day, if they allow their 
personal comfort or their health to be inter- 
fered with for want of suitably-made shoes or 
by reason of misapplied hose. The dress-reform 



184 The Uses and A buses of Dress. 

has perfected a mode of keeping the hose ad- 
justed so that no bands, elastic or otherwise, 
are allowed, either on the extremities or about 
the waist. This disposes of one of the common- 
est causes of cold feet and aching heads. It 
also provides a shoe whose sole is shaped like 
the sole of the natural foot, and whose heel is 
so low and so broad that it cannot tip the wear- 
er's spinal column from its natural line; thus 
disposing of one of the commonest causes of 
aching backs. French heels may fit French 
feet, and Chinese heels may fit Chinese feet, 
but the American woman had best wear home- 
made shoes. 

You should also be mindful of the fact that 
the slipper should be limited to the dressing- 
room during cold weather. The change from 
the high walking-shoe to the slipper, for gen- 
eral home wear, leaves too much of the foot 
with comparatively less covering than any other 
part of the body, and is a common cause of 
sore throats. 

Second only to health in importance among 
the essentials for being well dressed is neatness. 
Upon this point Miss Gale says, very aptly : 

"We often see much -bedraggled clothes 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 185 

worn by women who consider themselves en- 
titled to be called ladies. But, in whatever 
circle she may move, we feel certain that the 
woman cannot be self-respecting who can trail 
a long skirt across a muddy street, entailing 
not only the ruin of the dress, but the certain 
bedaubing of stockings and underclothes, with 
which the soiled petticoats must come in con- 
tact. .. .Another point in which neatness is 
often offended is in wearing ' about house' 
shabby finery, rather than neater and plainer 
dresses. There are many who seem to imagine 
that, when wearing an antiquated, spotted, and 
even ragged silk, they are better dressed than 
when attired in something that, though whole 
and clean, is of plainer fashion and material. 
.... Infinitely better does a woman clad in a 
simple, but fresh and tasteful, calico, deserve 
the epithet well-dressed, than one attired in 
the most expensive materials, if these, by long 
use, or from any other cause, have become 
soiled or frayed. 

" The same is true, in even greater degree, 
in regard to underclothes. The most elaborate 
needlework only adds to the disgust one feels 
if the garments it adorns are begrimed or torn; 



186 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

while those of plainest fashion, if clean and 
whole, or neatly mended, are always pleasing 
to the eye. 

" The third essential to good dressing is 
becomingness. 

" One may be attired in the most healthful 
of costumes, and both person and every article 
of clothing may be in the most spotless condi- 
tion, and yet shock the eye of taste. 

" To be well dressed, one must always take 
into consideration the complexion, age, features 
and figure of the wearer, and the harmony of 
the different parts of the costume. Thus, the 
brunette cannot wear the delicate shades so 
beautiful for the blonde ; and the woman of 
sixty becomes ridiculous if tricked out with 
the fluttering ribbons and bright colors appro- 
priate at sixteen. The sylph who scarcely 
turns the scales at a hundred pounds cannot 
carry the flowing mantles which have become 
necessary to obscure the too-expansive outlines 
of the matron whose position in a carriage is 
sufficiently indicated by the condition of the 
springs. The woman whose sharp, hatchet-like 
features seem fashioned to hew her way through 
the world should not follow the Japanese style 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 187 

of hair-dressing ; nor should the woman whose 
head resembles a large red cabbage deck her- 
self in big butterfly bows of scarlet ribbon, a 
jaunty little round hat, and a chignon emu- 
lating the proportions of the rotunda of our 
national capitol." 

The fourth point to be considered is, " What 
we can honestly afford " ; the fifth, " Our sta- 
tion in life " ; and the sixth and last, " Our 
present occupation." 

It will be quite obvious to you all, dear 
girl6, that all these points are worthy of your 
faithful consideration ; and let me exhort you 
especially to bear in mind that it is just as 
much your duty to your immediate family cir- 
cle to always appear at breakfast neatly, be- 
comingly and suitably attired as it is incumbent 
upon you to always look your best for the 
evening sociable ; nay, it is a more imperative 
duty : for to whom do you owe such high 
honor as to the parents who preside over the 
home ? 

I find it not uncommon for young ladies t 
appear at breakfast-table with the hair in crimps 
ing-pins and curl-papers; and I always decide 
that if I were a young man in search of a wife. 



188 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

I should turn my back upon all such girls as 
that. No woman should ever pour my coffee 
in the morning who would take more pains to 
look her prettiest for the evening caller than 
she would for me. That is what I should feel 
if I were a wife-hunter. 

Let me further exhort you, dear girls, to 
keep the buttons and button -holes on your 
gowns in good working order. There is hardly 
one more common or more repulsive sight than 
that presented by a pinned-up gown, with here 
and there a button missing. I, as physician, 
have had some sanguinary experiences in this 
matter while trying to minister to the needs of 
fainting girls. Of course, when a girl faints 
I go for her corset-strings — for she who faints 
out of corsets is the exception — and I have 
more than once stabbed my fingers most wo- 
fully with these abominable pins, on my way 
to the corset-strings. Please bear in mind that 
this is your first service to be rendered on such 
occasions, namely: to cut the corset -strings. 
That is far more essential than to run for the 
camphor-bottle. The next service is to open 
the windows ; the next is to sprinkle a few 
drops of cold water in the face ; while all the 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 189 

time you must send the curious away, and 
allow no one to remain in the room, or near 
the patieut, to vitiate the air for her. Give 
her plenty of air and plenty of chest- room, 
and nature will do the rest, in most cases. 

And now I have a word to say to you upon 
the subject of ear-rings. Do you not honestly 
think, down in your real hearts, that it is about 
as much a barbarity to punch holes in the ears 
for the setting of jewels as it is to punch them 
in the nose for that purpose ? Yet you call 
yourselves civilized, and the nose-punchers bar- 
barous. For one, 1 see no difference, except 
as a matter of taste, concerning which, you 
know, there can be no fair discussion, so capri- 
cious is that sense we name "taste'' — the same 
6ense which leads the women of one nation to 
tattoo the chin, while the men pierce the "lips 
and insert a double-headed sleeve-button into 
the aperture. 

We, Christians (?), punch holes in our ears 
and dangle bangles on our wrists, and send out 
missionaries to tell the people who are a score 
of centuries or more older than we that they 
are heathens, because they jingle bangles on 
their ankles and hang jewels in their noses I 



190 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

We are wont to speak of the "heathen 
Greeks," but they never professed to believe 
they were created in the image of their most 
honored deity without striving to be like the 
same. They did not claim to be created in the 
image of the goddess Hygeia, and then seek, 
by hideous and unnatural contrivances, to de- 
stroy the harmony and symmetry of that image. 
They did not pray to be delivered from sick- 
ness and sudden death, and then rush into fol- 
lies that are certain to bring one, if not both. 
They did not utter daily the words, " Lead us 
not into temptation," and immediately after- 
ward rush into it. No, Hygeia stood ever to 
them as a beneficent divinity, providing against 
disease, rather than as a physician vainly at- 
tempting to cure that which should never have 
been contracted. She stood then, as she stands 
now, the teacher of the laws of health. 

In Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" be- 
tween some of these " heathen Greeks " occurs 
the following, between Aspasia and Cleone : 

" Epimedea has been with me in my cham- 
ber. She asked me whether the women of 
Ionia had left off wearing ear-rings. I answered 
that I believed they always had worn them, 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 191 

and that they were introduced by the Persians, 
who had received them from nations more re- 
mote. 'And do you think yourself too young,' 
said she, 'for such an ornament?' producing, 
at the same time, a massy pair, inlaid with the 
largest emeralds. 'Alas! alas!' said she, 'your 
mother neglected you strangely. There is no 
hole in the ear, right or left ! We can mend 
that, however : I know a woman who will bring 
us the prettiest little pan of charcoal, with the 
prettiest little steel rod iu it; and, before you 
can cry out, one ear lets light through. These 
are yours,' said she. . . .' Generous Epimedea !' 
said I, ' do not 6ay things that pain me. I 
will accept a part of the present ; I will wear 
these beautiful emeralds on one arm. Think- 
ing of nailing them in my ears, you resolved 
to make me steady; but I am unwilling they 
should become dependencies of Attica.' ' All 
our young women wear them ; the goddesses, 
too.' ' The goddesses are in the right,' said 
I — ' their ears are marble ; but I do not believe 
any one of them would tell us that women 
were made to be the settings of pearls and 
emeralds.' 

" I had taken one, and was about to kiss 



192 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

her, when she said : ' Do not leave me an odd 
ear-ring ; put the other in the hair.' ' Epime- 
dea,' said I, ' I have made a vow never to wear 
on the head anything but one single flower, 
one single wheat-ear, green or yellow, and ivy 
or vine-leaves. .. .Our national dress, very dif- 
ferent from the dresses of barbarous nations, is 
not the invention of the ignorant or the slave ; 
but the sculptor, the painter and the poet have 
studied how best to adorn the most beautiful 
objects of their fancies and contemplations. 
The Indians, who believe that human pains and 
sufferings are pleasing to the Deity, make in- 
cisions in their bodies and insert in them im- 
perishable colors. They also adorn the ears 
and noses and foreheads of their gods. These 
were the ancestors of the Egyptians. We chose 
handsomer and better-tempered ones for our 
worship, but retained the same decoration in 
our sculpture, and to a degree which the sobri- 
ety of the Egyptian had merely reduced and 
chastened. Hence, we retain the only mark ot 
barbarism which dishonors our national dress — 
the use of ear-rings. If our statues should all 
be broken by some convulsion of the earth, 
would it be believed by future ages that, in 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 193 

the country and age of Sophocles, the women 
tore holes in their ears, to let rings into, as the 
more brutal of peasants do with the snouts of 
sows?'" 

I beg you to note Aspasia's resolution 
"never to wear on the head anything but one 
single flower, one single wheat-ear, green or 
yellow, and ivy or vine-leaves," for neither art 
nor fashion ever has or ever can invent so 
appropriate an ornament for the human head 
as this. 

Nor can all the combined efforts of Parisian 
perfumers ever supply you with any perfumes 
which you can so safely carry about you as 
those of natural flowers. 

Be guarded, I beg you, in your use of ar- 
tificial perfumes. Let them never be so loud 
as to be intrusive. Loud perfumes and loud 
costumes and loud manners generally go in 
company with each other, and each and all 
indicate a lack of that refinement which marks 
the real lady. 

For special occasions you require special 
suits. For mountain climbing or for rambles 
by the seashore nothing could be better than 
the short flannel dress, with drawers to match. 



194: The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

For promenade nothing could be better 
than the Princess walking -dress, minus the 
train, with the neat and comfortable walking- 
jacket. The train is elegant in its place — in 
the spacious drawing-room or on the platform ; 
but for a woman en jpromenade to be ever 
restricted to one hand, because her other is 
detailed to carry her train, argues a defect in 
her sense of " the eternal fitness of things." 

Shawls are unfit for the promenade, because 
they restrict the free use of the arms in walk- 
ing, and should be reserved for driving, where 
extra wraps are always needed. For the same 
reason the muff is objectionable as a part of 
the walking-costume, and should be reserved, 
with the shawl, for the drive. 

There can be no real grace of motion for 
the woman who walks with her hands in a 
muff; nor does she secure that full expansion 
of the chest, and so that full benefit of a walk 
in the open air, which are insured when the 
shoulders are thrown back and the arms left 
to assist, as Nature meant they should, in the 
act of walking. We are but quadrupeds, privi- 
leged, by reason of very slight variations in 
the arrangement of our skeletons, to walk with 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 195 

epines erect, instead of horizontal ; but this 
erect position, while it enables us to look 
down upon most of the other quadrupeds after 
we emerge from the quadrupedal manner of 
progression with which we inaugurate our walk 
through life, by no means leaves us independ- 
ent of our upper extremities for purposes of 
locomotion. 

The sealskins and other skins which go to 
make muffs had much better be put into the 
form of gloves and mittens, and the same skins, 
which custom has wrapped about the throat, 
are much more needed about the feet and an- 
kles than there. We invite many a sore throat 
by our pernicious habit of wearing furs about 
the neck till it is in a free perspiration from 
exercise, and then throwing them off in the 
church or other public place, so that the tem- 
perature is suddenly reduced. A pretty bit of 
lace or of ribbon or of knitted zephyr is as 
much protection as a young lady in good health 
requires, in our climate, about the neck. 

Finally, I beg you to strive to dress in such 
quiet ways, when out on promenade, and on all 
ordinary occasions, that you shall not be con- 
spicuous by reason of your clothes. It is aptly 



196 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

said that the best-dressed persons in any as- 
sembly are those who have impressed us so 
much more by their good manners than by 
their good clothes that we cannot remember 
what they wore when the occasion is past. I 
have met young ladies in society and on the 
promenade who made a powerful impression of 
ruffles. I could never afterward recall any- 
thing above this overpowering sense of ruffles 
when thinking of them. 

There is daily opportunity for you to exer- 
cise moral courage in this, as in the weightier 
details of life, by giving your preference to 
such modes of dress as are consistent with 
health and one's daily pursuits, rather than by 
following the idle caprices of fashion. 

" Do you object to the morning wrapper in 
the breakfast-room ?" 

By no means. Only let it be clean and 
whole, and worn with clean collar and cuffs or 
ruffs, and with whole shoes. The shoes need 
not be as thick as the outdoor walking-shoe, 
but they had better be as high, for the cold 
weather. Above all things, do not wear shabby 
shoes, with the buttons off and the stockings 
exposed, either indoors or out. 



The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 197 

I have seen this done with elegant morning 
wrappers ; and the same ladies habitually ap- 
peared at breakfast with the hair in curl-papers 
or crimping pins. 

" But how shall we keep our hands warm 
without muffs?"' 

In the same way your brothers do : by 
warm mittens or gloves. You can get very 
nice seal-skin gloves for the money which a 
muff costs. I observe that the hand which 
carries the train never gets cold, even though 
covered only with a close-fitting kid glove — 
provided that glove be a " three-button " of 
the most approved shade. 

" But what shall we do with all our pretty 
chemises ?" 

Get a pattern for the union garment, and 
make the chemises and drawers over. This is 
very easily done. Only summon up half the 
resolution by which you can manage to make 
over an old dress 60 as to make it appear new 
and "stylish," and the change is achieved by 
which you substitute " an ounce of prevention " 
for the pounds of cure which you will have to 
take if you persist in hanging skirts on your 



198 The Uses and Abuses of Dress. 

hips and in buttoning or tying their bands 
about your waists. " Where there is a will 
there is a way " — and a woman's will, which is 
proverbial, both for determination and inven- 
tion, ought not in so easy a matter to fail. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE MATE AND THE HOME. 

"O fortunate, O happy day, 
When a new household finds its place 
Among the myriad homes of earth, 
Like a new star just sprung to birth 
And rolled on its harmonious way 
Into the boundless realms of space." 

— Longfellow ("The Hanging of the Crane"). 

You have learned, in the foregoing chap- 
ters, that no single life, either of the plant or 
the animal world, ever fulfills its Creator's 
whole design. Such is the lesson of physiol- 
ogy. It matters not how simple the organism 
or how lowly the rank in the scale of creation, 
there is everywhere and always the dual ele- 
ment, the maternal and the paternal — these 
twain made one — supplementing and complet- 
ing the individual incompleteness. 



200 The Mate and the Home. 

The rose is never a perfect rose until, by 
its marriage of stamens and pistil, its crowning 
work — the rearing of other roses — becomes 
possible. This is the end and aim of all mar- 
riage — the perpetuation of the species — and 
every new marriage implies a "new house- 
hold." There is no moment in the whole life 
of a woman which is so big with possible joy 
or woe as that one which decides who is to be 
her mate in that " new household " ; and if 
there is any one warning which I would im- 
press upon your hearts and souls and minds 
with an emphasis which shall make it indelible, 
it is that you be not hasty or inconsiderate in 
making this decision. There cannot, by any 
possibility of accumulation of misery, come 
into your life so terrible a woe as that which 
results from a hasty, precipitate and rash mar- 
riage. The most forlorn "old maid" that lives 
now, or ever has lived, or ever will live, is 
supremely happy in comparison with her who, 
like the beetles in summer-time, has rushed 
headlong into the matrimonial flame and been 
singed for life. 

As I have already told you, marriage is 
the ultimate end and aim of every life, and 



The Mate and the Home. 201 

the true marriage is the holiest of all possible 
relationships. It is of God's own ordaining. 
The true wife and mother is the queen among 
women — yea, among all created beings. All 
men honor her, and are ready to accord her 
the highest place in creation. Second only to 
her is she who has had the courage to remain 
single because the right man never came ; for 
I am of those who believe that no woman is 
ever single, for her lifetime, for lack of the 
opportunity to marry at some time in her life ; 
and whenever I meet an " old maid," I am 
ready to do her honor for living up to the 
principle, "The best, or none!" 

Said a little girl, who has just said her 
" Seven times one," to me, "Auntie, what do 
you want I should be when I'm a woman ? " 

Said I, " I would like to see you just such 
a woman as your dear mamma, with a good 
husband and some very nice little children, all 
in a nice, pleasant home." 

" Well," said she, « I'll get a husband if I 
can find a good one; and if I can't, I won't 
have any ; would you, auntie ? " 

There, dear girls, is your motto for your 
matrimonial game. You can find nothing bet- 



202 The Mate and the Home. 

ter in the whole range of literature. " The 
best, or none ! " 

And what constitutes "the best"? First, 
and always, the healthiest ! And who is the 
healthiest ? First, and always, the most tem- 
perate ; and Temperance, you remember, means 
self-control. The young man who smokes has 
lost his self-control. His appetite has run away 
with him, and it will carry him to other forms 
of intemperance just as surely as night follows 
day. Beware of him ! 

Temperance is personal cleanliness ; is mod- 
esty ; is quietness ; is reverence for one'6 elders 
and betters ; is deference to one's mother and 
sisters ; is gentleness ; is courage ; is the with- 
holding from aught which leads to excess in 
daily living ; is the eating and drinking only of 
that w T hich will insure the best body which the 
best soul is to inhabit — nay, Temperance is all 
these, and more 

Let me tell you a true story. I know a 
man and woman who took a sudden fancy to 
each other upon their first meeting. They were 
both old enough to know better, but they rushed 
into matrimony, like two idiots, on a six weeks' 
acquaintance. Of course, they were terribly 



The Mate and the Home. 203 

disappointed in each other, and have been ter- 
ribly punished for their folly. They had never 
heard of each other till they met ; they knew 
nothing of each other's antecedents, nor any- 
thing of each other's personal habits, likes and 
dislikes, caprices or principles, or lack of prin- 
ciples. 

The man is eleven years older than the 
woman, and is one of those who " enjoy poor 
health " to such an extent that they follow up 
every new disease until they know and experi- 
ence all its symptoms. At one time he had 
five different doctors prescribing for him while 
he was attending to his daily occupation. He 
would take medicines by the wholesale, but 
was as averse to taking a bath as the woman, 
of whom I told you, in the New York Dis- 
pensary. He counted his pulse at every odd 
chance during the day, and looked at his tonguo 
with a corresponding devotion. He believed 
that night air is a deadly poison, and that hu- 
man beings should shut themselves indoors at 
sunset, all the year round ; close all the doors 
and windows, and keep them closed till sunrise. 

The woman was nineteen at the time they 
met. She had never known anything about 



204: The Mate and the Home. 

" poor health," and was quite unprepared to 
unite with this man in enjoying it. She had 
always been accustomed to her daily bath, and 
regarded every one as intolerably filthy who 
did not follow her example, for she was of a 
very intense nature, and what she believed 
she believed with an overpowering force which 
tolerated no dissent on the part of her imme- 
diate associates. In short, she was something, 
in temperament, like what is implied by the 
term "bottled lightning." 

Their domestic life was very much like 
that of the cats of Kilkenny, as you may well 
suppose. She stormed, and took her baths, 
and opened the windows. He cried, took no 
baths, shut the windows, and called the doc- 
tors. There is no law of man's enactment for 
the punishment of such intemperance as they 
were guilty of, nor is any needed. They broke 
God's laws of the eternal fitness of things, and 
God has punished them in his own way; and 
they stand to-day, as do many others who have 
done likewise, as living examples of what men 
and women should not do. 

I beg you all to take warning, and do not 
likewise. Do not trust yourself and your 



The Mate and the Home. 205 

whole future to one who attracts you simply 
by a fair exterior, but acquaint yourself with 
his personal habits, his family antecedents, his 
associations, his tastes and his distastes, his be- 
liefs and his disbeliefs. Remember that the 
marriage contract binds you for life to one 
who is to be to you like another self, so close 
is the marriage relation, and you can no more 
get away from that other self, if he prove to 
be odious to you, than you can escape from 
your own self if you make yourself odious. 
There he must be, day after day, perhaps one 
of the "unwashed," with a breath horribly 
offensive, either by reason of his unwashed 
person or by reason of the use of tobacco or 
of rum, ever by your side, " till death do you 
part." 

Ah, my dear girls, if you could only learn 
to look bevond the orange-blossoms far enough 
to see the rue which so soon succeeds them, in 
too many cases, you would learn to be duly 
cautious in this momentous matter. " The 
best, or none!" And do not trust your own 
unaided judgment, but give your whole confi- 
dence to your mother, or to her who stands in 
her place, if you be motherless ; for the ex- 



206 The Mate and the Home. 

perience of twenty years or more is of untold 
value in a woman's ability to counsel you in 
this respect. 

And even as you demand " the best " in the 
husband, so is it his to demand " the best " in 
the wife. The best man is he who will look 
wisely and well for his other self. To win 
him you must be worthy of him; and to be 
worthy of him you must be, like him, first of 
all, healthy, and temperate in all things in 
order that you be healthy. You must be cour- 
ageous enough to resist every temptation to go 
in ways which your better self rejects, and to 
even be unfashionable, if to be fashionable 
means to do things which will conflict with 
God's eternal laws for your well-being. 

You must be self-reliant and self-control- 
ling, for the exigencies of married life call for 
these qualities in the highest degree. The 
hysterical wife may tempt the best man to 
"fall from grace," for he is mortal. 

You must be prudent, in speech as in ac« 
tion; for to be prudent — provident — is in all 
respects opposed to thoughtlessness or heed- 
lessness, or any intemperate word or deed. 
The wise woman " openeth her mouth with 



The Mate and the Home. 207 

wisdom ; and in her tongue is the law of kind- 
ness. She looketh well to the ways of her 
household, and eateth not the bread of idle- 
ness. Her children arise up and call her bless- 
ed; her husband also, and he praiseth her" 
(Proverbs xxxi). 

You must be unselfish. It is all very nice 
to be admired and courted, and to have him 
say fair and flattering words to you along with 
the bouquets and sweetmeats; but these are 
only so many little preliminaries. You might 
as well understand, in the beginning, that mar- 
riage requires the utmost unselfishness on both 
sides, and that each is to find his and her great- 
est happiness in giving, not in receiving. I 
have seen some sad instances of the grossest 
selfishness in homes where the one is always 
giving and the other is always taking. Some- 
times it is the husband who gives his every 
thought and his every effort to an exacting, 
selfish, peevish and forever-discontented woman. 
The more he does for her happiness, the more 
unhappy she becomes, yet he carries him- 
self serenely over all the ruggedness of her 
ways, and possesses his soul in patience. Such 
a man is but " little lower than the angels," 



208 The Mate and the Home. 

and I have seen him. He is comely to be- 
hold. 

And I have seen homes where the wife 
does all the giving. It is her daily and hourly 
study to so order her household and her sur- 
roundings as that the delicate sensibilities of 
her lord and master may never be jarred. In- 
stead of carrying his half of the burdens of life, 
he puts both halves upon her shoulders, and 
she meekly trudges on, bending a little and a 
little more lowly as the years go on, and soon 
she will fall by the wayside, and he will never 
know why, for his thoughts are fixed wholly 
upon himself. He is the kind of man whom 
George MacDonald describes as " so sensitive 
that he shuts his ears to his sister's griefs, 
because it spoils his digestion to think of 
them." Yet he is a very proper man in the 
eyes of society, and very " respectable " in the 
way alluded to by the same writer when he 
puts these words into the mouth of Robert Fal- 
coner : " But one thing is clear to me, that no 
indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual 
nature so much as respectable selfishness." 
The man who is selfish in his own home, and 
with his own wife and children, was, beyond 



The Mate and the Home. 209 

all question, equally selfish with his mother 
and sisters before he had a wife ; and so I say 
to you again, dear girls, observe how your 
young men treat their mothers and sisters, and 
guide yourselves accordingly. 

" But you are terribly practical !" is the 
reflection which doubtless fills your minds 
while I ho]d your attention down to the de- 
tails of every-day life, instead of painting for 
you fair pictures of ideal homes in cloud-land. 
Dear hearts, you can build all the air castles 
without any of my help. You are at just the 
age when that kind of architecture prevails. 
And the more imaginative your temperament, 
the more of such castles you will build. You 
will have no difficulty in investing the hand- 
some young man who paid you such flattering 
homage last evening, and who heaped his floral 
offering with still more attractive flowers of 
sentiment, with a halo which shall preclude all 
such questions as, Is he temperate ? Is he un- 
selfish ? Is he clean, morally and physically 
and mentally ? 

That was the case with the unhappy pair 
whos3 story I have told you. Their vivid im- 
aginations idealized each other to the utter 



210 The Mate and the Home. 

extinction of all common-sense. He was tall 
and handsome, and of honeyed sweetness of 
manner, and he took her out sailing by moon- 
light (the night air had no poison in it then !), 
and told her that the light of the moon and 
of the stars was dim compared with the light 
in her eyes, and that the blush of the roses 
he brought her was put to shame by the bloom 
of her round cheeks. 

Of course she forgot to find out whether he 
washed himself once a year, or once in a life- 
time, or never. She could never be so fear- 
fully practical and unpoetical as that. But 
the orange-blossoms had not yet faded when 
she made discoveries even worse than I can 
tell you here, and which proved the assumption 
that unclean souls *are most at home in unclean 
bodies. And he found out that the "eyes 
which put the stars to shame " could flash 
lightning at him in most terrific fashion. 
Alas ! poor souls ! If they only had listened 
to the practical promptings of common-sense, 
what a world of misery they would have es- 
caped ! 

But I must not dweU longer upon the 
choice of a mate, and will assume that vou 



The Mate and the Home. 211 

have chosen deliberately, wisely, and well. 
He is healthy. That is, he inherits, so far as 
you can learn from his family physician (for 
that is the one who should decide upon the 
iitness of parties for marriage), no scrofula, no 
consumption, and no insanity. He is temper- 
ate. That is, he neither eats nor drinks that 
which can do him harm, nor has he, by excesses 
of any kind, so weakened his digestion that he 
is obliged to smoke a cigar in order to digest 
his dinner. He is clean, physically and mor- 
ally. He is industrious, else he must be 
vicious. 

You are now, from this time onward, by 
all the love and honor which you entertain for 
each other, bound to order your lives in high- 
est and holiest conformity with the one ulti- 
mate end and aim of marriage, namely, the 
establishment of "a new household," and the 
rearing of immortal souls. Do not, I beg you, 
rush into that fashionable, but fatal, error 01 
getting married before your own nest is built 
and taking up your abode in another's nest, 
like the cuckoo, the thief among birds. The 
practice of marrying and boarding leads to 
more vice and crime than is known to any but 



212 The Mate and the Home. 

physicians. I, with only a limited experience 
as medical practitioner, can count a score of 
brides who have come to me to beg me to 
murder their unborn children, because they 
were " boarding," and it was not " convenient 
to have a family " ! Most horrible of horrors ! 
Most foolish of follies ! Yet any physician can 
tell you the same terrible fact. 

That "idleness is the parent of vice" is 
another fact which finds sad confirmation in 
the life of many a young woman who begins 
her married life in a boarding-house. She 
has nothing to do, as a rule, but to fix up in 
her new clothes and look pretty. After a 
time she fails to find satisfaction in being ad- 
mired by one man ; and as there are generally 
a half dozen idle men for every industrious 
one, it happens too often, sad as it is to relate, 
that she comes to court and receive the admi- 
ration of the six idle ones while her husband 
is engaged in honest labor. 

Therefore, I say again, and always again, 
dear girls, do not be in haste to marry, for any 
reason whatever. The French proverb is no 
less susceptible of application here than else- 
where : " He who tires not, tires adversity. 



The Mate and the Home. 213 

All comes right to him who can afford to 
wait.'' 

And while you wait, do not shut yourself 
away from air and light and all the joy which 
they insure, by mousing yourself up with a 
sewing-machine and making a pile of elabo- 
rately-decorated underclothing which will prob- 
ably be of very little use to you after it. is done. 
I have in mind a bride who, like many another, 
did that very thing ; and when she put on the 
bridal veil, neither it nor the powder on the 
face could conceal the pale yellow tint of the 
face which was a stranger to air and sunlight. 
The elegant white silk was fitted to the last 
degree of smoothness over a waist which could 
be clasped with two hands, and the poor thing 
looked more like the bride of death than like 
a woman going to assume the sacred duties of 
a wife and mother. 

In due time a poor, little, weak, white-faced 
boy came to her, who has never known what 
it is to be ruddy and strong and buoyant with 
fresh young life, and I fear he never will know. 
The poor, yellow-faced mother grows yellower 
every day, along with the useless underclothing 
which lies in the chests, and in whose fabrica- 



214 The Mate and the Home. 

tion she wasted the vitality which she ought 
to have secured for herself and her boy by 
going out daily in pursuit of it. Indeed, it- is 
marvelous how it ever came to pass that a 
young woman on the eve of marriage should 
be expected to devote herself to amassing such 
supplies of underclothing as custom has made 
almost imperative; for nine out of ten who 
follow the custom will tell yon it is mere folly, 
that the fashion of these things changes as does 
that of all outward things, and that they get 
tired of the old long before they can put it 
aside for the new. 

Alas ! how true it is, all through the life 
of woman, that it is her clothing which, more 
than any single cause, contributes to her phys- 
ical, as to her moral, undoing ! She who main- 
tains her chastity none the less loses her health 
by her devotion to that capricious something 
which we call "fashion," and she who has bar- 
tered her chastity has, in most cases, been mis- 
led by the promise of ribbons and fine clothes. 

The sewing-machine, which ought to be a 
blessing to woman, has been so sadly perverted, 
by the excesses in the way of ornamentation to 
which it has given rise, that it has proved a 



The Mate and the Home. 215 

curse, in that it has led to many forms of 
uterine and ovarian disease, and, in not a few 
instances, to the death of unborn children, 
whose mothers have ignorantly spent hour 
after hour at it in the fabrication of more than 
uselessly betucked and beruffled infant ward- 
robes. 

It seems to me we but dimly comprehend, 
after all these centuries, what wealth of mean- 
ing Moses, the learned physician, had in mind 
when he told us that the making of clothing 
was the first result of that first yielding to 
temptation which led to the knowledge of 
good and evil. Shall we ever learn ? Shall 
we ever regain the lost Eden ? If we ever do, 
we shall surely approach it by the way of the 
perfect Home. 

And where shall we find this home % This 
will be the first question for you and your 
chosen mate to answer, when you have each 
decided that you have chosen " the best." 
First, where, and second, what, shall the home 
be? 

For location, I beg you avoid the heart of 
a great city. That is for business and for hotels 
and boarding-houses, not for homes. Choose, 



216 The Mate and the Home. 

rather, the companionship of green fields and 
vocal woodlands where modern transit conven- 
iences insure ready access to all the advantages 
of the city, while, at the same time, you avoid 
its din, its dust, and its distractions. A homely 
counsel tells us that it is safe to build a home 
where a woodchuck digs his hole, for there 
you are sure of good drainage. Do not be 
afraid of climbing a hill. I suppose the fore- 
fathers were so imbued with the idea of get- 
ting shelter from persecution in all forms, 
whether ecclesiastical, aboriginal, or climatic, 
that they nestled together under -the hills of 
New England, rather than on them, so that 
one is strack with their apparent disregard of 
the sanitary instincts of the woodchuck in 
noting how they established alike their farm- 
houses and their towns in valleys and beneath 
hills, where the sanitarian of to-day finds most 
favoring conditions for typhoid or malarial fe- 
vers, in defective drainage or in exhalations 
from low lands. It is curious to note, too, 
how the instinct for shelter extended even to 
the churches, and led to the building of close 
boxes for pews, with closely-buttoning doors to 
them ; and even the minister was buttoned into 



The Mate and the Home. 217 

his pulpit, as if to keep him safe from the 
Indians. 

But quite other foes than red men are 
" the foes of one's own household " ; yet no 
less to be dreaded and shunned are these, 
when they take the form of bad air, insuffi- 
cient sunlight, and defective drainage. Lift up 
your eyes, then, unto the hills, whence cometh 
your strength, when you look for the place 
where your model home shall be. Then plant 
no evergreens nor any other trees about your 
house where they can cut off your air and 
your sunlight, unless you want evergreens for 
a wall of protection from the north winds. 
The true sanitary home will have no living- 
rooms nor sleeping-rooms on its north side, 
but will reserve that for storerooms and for 
the refrigerator, and that is the only side 
where the evergreens are tolerable. 

Then plan your house so that every room 
you occupy shall be a sunny one. You want 
a sunny dining-room, a sunny sitting-room, and 
sunny sleeping-rooms, and not one of these 
rooms should have a carpet or any furniture 
which is too good for the sun to shine upon. 
If you must have one of those chilling abomi- 



218 The Mate and the Home. 

nations known as a "parlor," with its darkness 
and mustiness and grandeur of upholstery, 
where formal calls are made, and where each 
party breathes a sigh of relief when the for- 
midable task is accomplished — if you must have 
such a place of torture, it may as well be on 
the north side, with the refrigerator; but I beg 
you not to put me in it when I come to see 
you. 

Your next care, after the insuring of free 
access of air and sunshine to all the inhabited 
parts .of the house, will be directed to the 
securing of an abundant supply of pure water. 
The location of dwellings in low lands because 
it is easy to get water there is an apt confirma- 
tion of the saying that " lazy people take the 
most pains " ; for the low-land dwellers are the 
best patrons of the doctor and the pill-man; 
and if they would work a little harder to get 
water on a height, they would be spared much 
of the labor expended in getting money with 
which to buy the " bitters " and pills which a 
residence in the low lands implies. If you are 
to depend upon well-water, you must bear in 
mind the following facts, which I quote from 



The Mate and the Home. 219 

"A Manual of Practical Hygiene," by Dr. 
Parker, of England: 

" A well drains an extent of ground around 
it, in the shape of an inverted cone, which is 
in proportion to its own depth and the loose- 
ness of the soil. In very loose soils a well of 
sixty or eighty feet will drain a large area, 
perhaps as much as two hundred feet in diam- 
eter, or even more ; but the exact amount is 
not, as far as I know, precisely determined. 

" Certain trades pour their refuse water 
into rivers : gas-works ; slaughter-houses ; tripe- 
houses; size, horn, and isinglass manufactories; 
wash-houses, starch-works, and calico-printers; 
and many others. In houses, it is astonishing 
how many instances occur of the water of butts, 
cisterns and tanks getting contaminated by 
leaking of pipes and other causes, such as the 
passage of sewer-gas through overflow pipes, 
etc. 

"As there is now no doubt that typhoid 
fever, cholera and dysentery may be caused by 
water rendered impure by the evacuations 
passed in those diseases; and as simple diar- 
rhoea seems also to be largely caused by animal 
organic suspension or solution, it is evident 



220 The Mate and the Home. 

how necessary it is to be quick-sighted in re- 
gard to the possible impurity of water from 
incidental causes of this kind. Therefore, all 
tanks and cisterns should be inspected regu- 
larly, and any accidental source of impurity 
must be looked out for. Wells should be cov- 
ered ; a good coping put round to prevent 
substances being washed down ; the distance 
from cesspits and dung-heaps should be care- 
fully noted ; no sewer should be allowed to 
pass near a well. The same precautions should 
be taken with springs. In the case of rivers, 
we must consider if contamination can result 
from the discharge of faecal matters, trade ref- 
use, etc/' 

I quote next from " The Sanitarian " an 
illustration of the results of a disregard of these 
precautions : 

"A correspondent of the Massachusetts State 
Board of Health gives a sketch of the cellar of 
a house in Hadley, built by a clergyman. It 
was provided with an open well and sink-drain, 
with its deposit-box in close proximity thereto, 
affording facility to discharge its gases in the 
well as the most convenient place. The cellar 
was used, as country cellars commonly are, for 



The Mate and the Home. 221 

the storage of provisions of every kind, and 
the windows were never opened. The only es- 
cape for the soil moisture and ground air, except 
that which was absorbed by the drinking-water, 
was through the crevices of the floor into the 
rooms above. After a few months' residence in 
the house, the clergyman's wife died of fever. 
He soon married again, and the second wife 
also died of fever, within a year from the time 
of marriage. His children were sick. He oc- 
cupied the house about two years. The wife of 
his successor was soon taken ill, and barely 
escaped with her life. A physician then took 
the house ! He married, and his wife soon 
after died of fever. Another physician took the 
house, and within a few monthc came near 
dying of erysipelas. He deserved it. The 
house, meanwhile, received no treatment; the 
doctors, according to their usual wont, even in 
their own families, were satisfied to deal with 
the consequences, and leave the causes to do 
their worst. 

"Next after the doctors, a school-teacher took 
the house, and made a few changes, 'for con- 
venience,' apparently, for substantially it re- 
mained the same — for he, too, escaped as by 



222 The Mate and the Home. 

the skin of his teeth. Finally, after the fore- 
closure of many lives, the sickness and fatality 
of the property became so marked that it be- 
came unsalable. When last sold, every sort of 
prediction was made as to the risk of occu- 
pancy ; but, by a thorough attention to sanitary 
conditions, no such risks have been encountered." 
It is quite probable that the usual com- 
ments upon " the mysterious dealings of Provi- 
dence " were made at the several funeral cere- 
monies which followed upon the several suicides 
above recorded, so habitual is it to attribute the 
consequences of such lamentable ignorance and 
stupidity to the God who 

"moves in a mysterious way 
His wonders to perform," 

when, if we would only look beyond conse- 
quences into causes, we should see that it is 
just as much a part of God's beautiful system 
of cause and effect that typhoid fever should 
ensue upon bad drainage as that a crop of wheat 
should reward the sower. 

I recently heard a little boy commenting 
upon the death of one of his playmates, and 
this is the conclusion he arrived at concerning 
the cause of what the clergyman is wont to 



The Mate and the Home. 223 

call a "mysterious dispensation of Providence": 
" Mamma," said he, "I think I know why 



died. His mamma didn't know how to take 
care of him, and so God thought he had better 
take him home and take care of him himself." 

It is difficult to see how any commentator 
could improve upon that conclusion. Alas ! 
how few mothers do know how to take care of 
their children, and how few are capable of ex- 
ercising that intelligent forethought which is 
necessary for the establishment of a successful 
" new household " ! 

We hear much about "the higher educa- 
tion of women " as a means of admission into 
the several professions which have hitherto been 
regarded as accessible only by men, and society 
is, for the most part, coolly awaiting, with 
folded hands, the result of their efforts at com- 
petition in these professions. The several stages 
of opposition and ridicule have been surmounted. 
Women have been through the same college 
curriculum with men ; have taken diplomas from 
schools of law, divinity, and medicine ; and are 
now on trial before a jury which differs vastly 
from the ordinary array of " twelve idiots," in 
that it represents, largely, the best thought of 



224 The Mate, and the Home. 

the day. It is plain to all that, if a woman 
essays to perform any work which is not, from 
its very nature, purely woman's work, she 
must, for the time being, ignore all consider- 
ations except those pertaining to the best 
achievement : hence she must accept judgment 
upon the work itself, the worker being prac- 
tically ignored. 

For ns, the question is purely and exclu- 
sively womanly ; and for me, coming to you as 
a teacher of what you " ought to know," the 
way is as straight and as plain as God can 
make it. 

There are some things which God has told 
women they are to do, and which none but they 
can do, and the teaching of those things be- 
longs especially to the department of Physiol- 
ogy. It is for me, then, to endeavor to point 
out to you the way by which you may come 
most nearly to Wordsworth's standard of 

"A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, to command, 
And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel's light." 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE PERFECT WOMAN. 

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father 
which is in heaven is perfect." — Matthew v, 48. 

. " Read the passage in its connection, and 
you will comprehend its meaning. Jesus has 
just been describing the Father in heaven as 
causing his sun to shine upon the just and 
upon the unjust ; that is to say, in the concep- 
tion of Jesus, God is perfect in proportion as 
he comes down, and not in proportion as he 
remains above; in proportion as he shows his 
favor to the worst, not in proportion as he 
exalts himself above the best. ...The perfec- 
tion of God consists in his communicating life 
to the smallest things, in his doing the most 
ungracious tasks for ungracious people, in his 



226 The Perfect Woman. 

drudging at enterprises that men think too 
unclean for their dainty fingers. . . . 

" The perfect life of Jesus — how was that 

expressed? Great he was not, according 

to ordinary human standards. Socially he was 
not great. He was despised as the friend of 
the publicans and sinners; he was classed 
by the saintly people of his day among the 
' come-outers ' and infidels; because he talked 
in human fashion with a bad woman in the 
street he was considered no better than she. . . . 
Where, then, was his perfection ? Simply in 
the fact that he could talk with the woman 
and not despise her; that he could go among 
the lowest, as one of them, without any word 
of scorn ever dropping from his lips; that he 
was not cold to any form of human suffering 
or misery.... A great phrase in our time is 
* self-development,' as describing the aim of 
perfection for modern men. But the merit of 
6elf-development depends wholly upon the qual- 
ity of the self-hood that is developed. The 
development of a very cheap, tawdry style of 
self-hood is not noble .... Self-hood does not 
consist in development above or beyond hu- 
manity, but in sympathy with it. Take our 



The Perfect Woman. 227 

own Emerson — that beautiful shaft of polished 
marble. How exquisite his mind ! how finished 
his taste ! how delicate his spiritual percep- 
tions ! how serene and self-absorbed his air as 
he goes along the streets ! Yet Emerson is 
one of the most entirely human persons in the 
country : a patriot ; a neighbor ; a friend to the 
homely; a man who puts his name to good 
causes without questioning their popularity, 
and gives his strength to any work that is 
work for humanity; a man who has no shame 
to be seen walking side by side with the illit- 
erate or the outcast if they are seeking the 
welfare of the common humanity which includes 
them both. 

" We are fascinated by the fountain of 
water, admiring the crystal jet as it pushes up 
toward the skies, flashing in the sunlight; but 
it is the turning-point that makes the culmina- 
tion of the beauty. It is when the column 
bends over, begins to fall, and, falling, dis- 
perses itself in drops of dew, clothing every 
blade of grass with diamonds, that the fount- 
ain becomes really beautiful." — Rev. O. B. 
Frothingham ("The Perfect Life"). 

Along with the much talking of " the higher 



228 The Perfect Woman. 

education of women " there goes much concern- 
ing " the perfect home." The world is waiting 
to refresh itself in that " perfect home," and it 
will continue to wait until "the perfect wo- 
man n comes, for she alone can create it. We 
have already an ahundance of " pattern house- 
keepers," who fight dirt and flies and sunlight 
out of their houses with a persistency worthy 
of their Puritan descent. They tread round 
and round in their little peck measures of daily 
duty. They make very nice bread. They fry 
very nice doughnuts (?). They make very nice 
pies and pickles and sweetmeats (?). Their 
children are patterns of neatness and propriety ; 
they never have soiled stockings nor soiled pin- 
afores; they never make mud-pies, nor pick up 
dirty stones, nor handle " horrid bugs and 
worms," nor " litter up " the house with 
"weeds" from the woods. 

Then, too. we have an abundance of the 
" Top-Lofty ' style of women. They can write 
big books, full of big words, which one must 
study with dictionary in hand, as if they were 
written in a foreign tongue. 

They can talk in proibundest style about 
" peripheral influences of an extremely power- 



The Perfect Woman. 229 

ful and continuous kind, which can set going a 
non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may 
localize itself in those nerves upon whose cen- 
ters the morbific peripheral influence is perpet- 
ually pouring in." 

Some of them can " scold upon the plat- 
form " until " the planets shudder, shrink, and 
grow more rusty " ; but among them all we 
yet look in vain for the answer to Solomon's 
question : 

"Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is 
far above rubies. 

"The heart of her husband doth safely trust in 
her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. 

"She will do him good, and not evil, all the days 
of her life. 

"She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly 
with her hands. 

"She is like the merchants' ships: she bringeth her 
food from afar. 

" She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth 
meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. 

"She considereth a field and buyeth it; with the 
fruit of her hand she planteth a vineyard. 

"She girdeth her loins with strength, and strength- 
eneth her arms. 

i( She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her 
candle goeth not out by night. 

" She lay e tk her hands to the spindle, and her 
hands hold the distaff. 



230 The Perfect Woman. 

" She stretcheth out her hands to the poor; yea, 
she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. 

"She is not afraid of the snow for her household; 
for all her household are clothed with scarlet. 

"She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her 
clothing is silk and purple. 

"Her husband is known in the gates when he sit- 
teth among the elders of the land. 

"She maketh fine linen, and selleth it, and deliv- 
ereth girdles unto the merchant. 

"Strength and honor are her clothing; and she 
shall rejoice in time to come. 

* 'She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her 
tongue is the law of kindness. 

"She looketh well to the ways of her household, 
and eateth not the bread of idleness. 

"Her children arise up and call her blessed; her 
husband also, and he praiseth her. 

"Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou 
excellest them all. 

"Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a 
woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. 

"Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her 
own works praise her in the gates." — Proverbs xxxi. 

During all the centuries which have " dropped 
like grains of sand " from the hand of the Infi- 
nite since those words were first uttered, woman 
has been getting a little and a little nearer to 
this ideal type. She is making great strides, 
during this nineteenth century, toward the in- 



The Perfect Woman. 231 

tellectual requirements here set forth ; but it is 
honestly questioned, by physiologists, whether 
she is paying that regard to that girding of 
"her loins with strength v without which all 
other acquisitions will avail but little. 

The late Dr. Edward Clarke, when he gave 
her the fruits of his ripe experience and observ- 
ation in his book called "Sex in Education, or 
a Fair Chance for the Girls,'" did more to recall 
her to a just and rational appreciation of her 
physiological position in Creation than has been 
done by any modern writer; and, so far as I 
know, the educated women physicians of to-day 
have, in the main, advocated his views therein 
expressed, in their efforts to induce women to 
respect the peculiar mechanism of their bodies, 
and to cease their attempts to stifle and ignore 
it. He says : " In all their work they must 
respect their own organization, and remain wo- 
men . . .If we would give our girls a fair chance, 
and see them become and do their best, by 
reaching after and attaining an ideal beauty 
and power which shall be a crown of glory and 
a tower of strength to the republic, we must 
look after their complete development as wo- 
men .... Physiology confirms the hope of the 



232 The Perfect Woman. 

race by asserting that the loftiest heights of in- 
tellectual and spiritual vision and force are free 
to each sex, and accessible by each ; but adds 
that each must climb in its own way, and ac- 
cept its own limitations, and, when this is done, 
promises that each will find the doing of it 
not to weaken or diminish, but to develop 
power." 

Returning, now, to the consideration of Sol- 
onion's ideal woman, we find that the first 
essential is that she be "virtuous," and to be 
virtuous, in the purest sense of the word, is to 
be strong. " Virtue, Latin, virtus: strength, 
courage, excellence." — Webster. It is sad to 
acknowledge, as we are compelled to do, that 
the "virtuous" woman, in this literal sense, is 
the exception rather than the rule. 

"She considereth a field, and buyetli it; 
with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vine- 
yard." 

This implies a practical knowledge of soils, 
and of agriculture ; of geometry, of mineralogy, 
and of botany ; of the comparative value, as 
well as the measurement, of land. 

If the wives of those ministers and doctors 
and of the schoolmaster who fell victims to the 



The Perfect Woman. 233 

bad air of that Hadley house, of which we 
heard in the previous chapter, had been prop- 
erly educated to do their share in the selection 
of a site for a house it is probable that their 
lives would all have been saved. You will 
notice that it was the women and children who 
died. You know it is the women and children 
who spend the most time in the house. The 
men have their outside lives, largely apart from 
the home and its belongings, and its sanitary 
conditions have, naturally, far less intimate re- 
lations to their health than they have to the 
physical well-being of the wife and children. 
Therefore, the " perfect woman " will know 
enough about soils and drainage and ventilation 
and water-sources and architecture to aid her 
mate intelligently in the establishment of their 
"new household." 

I do not suppose that the second Mrs. Rev. 

, of Hadley, ever thought of asking why 

the first Mrs. Rev. — — died. Doubtless the 

Rev. Mr. gave her a proper funeral and a 

proper headstone, wore the crape of the proper 
width and for the proper length of time, while, 
at the same time with the wearing of the crape, 
the selection of the second Mrs. Rev. — — - pro- 



234 The Perfect Woman. 

ceeded in proper manner. The selection being 
duly made, I suppose the second Mrs. Hev. 

, in spe, at once sat down and made a pile 

of new chemises. Probably she never looked 
at the cellar or the location of the well and 
waste-pipes of the house where she was to pre- 
side. So she went there and died, in her sim- 
ple ignorance, as the doctor's wife and the 
schoolmaster's wife did, in theirs. " Provi- 
dence " was credited with taking them " myste- 
riously." A little more light and air in the 
cellar cleared up the " mystery." 

The " perfect woman " " girdeth her loins 
with strength, and strengtheneth her arms." 

The ordinary woman "girdeth her loins" 
with corsets, and weakeneth her arms by fold- 
ing them in a muff. 

" She perceiveth that her merchandise is 
good : her candle goeth not out by night." 

This may quite properly imply that she is 
so well educated in the varieties of merchandise 
that she cannot be swindled. 

"She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; 
yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy." 

The idle tramp cannot impose upon her 
credulity. She has the discretion requisite for 



The Perfect Woman. 235 

discriminating between the deserving and the 
undeserving. 

" She is not afraid of the snow for her 
household ; for all her household are clothed 
with scarlet." 

It would almost seem that Solomon's pro- 
phetic soul projected itself over the centuries 
into the dress -reform rooms in Boston and 
viewed the red flannel, close-fitting undergar- 
ments which are beginning to take the place 
of white cotton curtains about the legs for 
snowy weather. 

" She openeth her mouth with wisdom ; 
and in her tongue is the law of kindness." 

The " perfect woman " will be incapable 
of gossip or of slander, or of any interference 
with the domestic affairs of her neighbors. 
She will be so occupied with doing her own 
work well that she will have no time for " tea- 
parties " where tongues unused to " the law of 
kindness" are wont to make havoc of reputa- 
tions. Of her neighbors' virtues she will be 
swift to speak, in society; concerning their 
faults she will be charitably reticent. 

" She looketh well to the ways of her house- 
hold and eateth not the bread of idleness." 



236 The Perfect Woman. 

Hence she will never have hysteria. All 
the doctors know that the hysterical women 
are those who have no care of house or chil- 
dren, and whose every thought is centered 
upon their own personal ease and happiness. 
The most unhappy woman in the world is the 
one who has nothing to do but be happy. 

" Her children arise up and call her bless- 
ed ; her husband also, and he praiseth her." 

There is no jewel in Victoria's crown which 
can compare in luster with that jewel in her 
reputation whereby she shines upon her king- 
dom as a faithful wife and mother ; and each 
one of you, my dear girls, may shine in your 
own kingdom, the home whose queen you shall 
be, with a luster which shall be reflected through 
all the ages beyond you. The character of its 
mothers decides the character of every people. 

Every child that is born spends its first ten 
years with its mother, or with some woman 
who represents its mother. During those ten 
years its character is, substantially, formed. 

" For the child, }^et in native innocence, 
before his parents have become his serpents on 
the tree — speechless, still unsusceptible of ver- 
bal empoisonment, led by customs, not by words 



The Perfect Woman. 237 

and reasons, therefore all the more easily moved 
on the narrow and small pinnacle of sensuous 
experience — for the child, I say, on this bound- 
ary-line between the monkey and the man, the 
most important era of life is contained in the 
years which immediately follow his non-exist- 
ence, in which, for the first time, he colors and 
moulds himself by companionship with others. 
The parent's hand may cover and shelter the 
germinating seed, but not the luxuriant tree; 
consequently, first faults are the greatest; and 
mental maladies, unlike the small-pox, are the 
more dangerous the earlier they are taken. 

" Every new educator effects less than his 
predecessor ; until at last, if we regard all life 
as an educational institution, a circumnavigator 
of the world is less influenced by all the na- 
tions he has seen than by his nurse." — Jean 
Paul Fk. Richter. 

Who, then, shall dare to put limits to the 
"higher education" of a being who holds in 
her hands the destinies of the human race ! 

"Noverre only required from a good di- 
rector of the ballet — besides the art of dancing 
- — geometry, music, poetry, painting, and anat- 



omy 



5? 



238 The Perfect Woman. 

Shall a woman, who, by her influence over 
her son's first decade of existence, is to do 
more toward his final manhood than all the 
people and all the nations he is to encounter 
in after life — shall she limit her studies within 
narrower bounds than those assigned to the 
"director of the ballet"? No! let her climb 
to the highest heights of science; but let her 
always remember that she is designed to be 
a mother by a law of God which is stamped 
upon her being in characters which assert them- 
selves to her, every hour of her life, from the 
time she passes from childhood through the 
portals which mark the entrance upon the age 
of potential maternity till she leaves those 
eventful thirty-five or forty years behind her ! 

" Her sex is the unalterable decree which 
she can cast no ballot to vote away from her, 
and assume no profession to raze it from the 
eternal tablets of her distinction. All the 
purely modern questions which relate to her 
career — the efforts to equalize with man's her 
wages, to multiply her opportunities, to claim 
her. interest in the politics of human rights, 
to secure her alleviating presence in the rude 
scenes of republicanism — successful as these 



The Perfect Woman. 23^ 

tendencies may be, cannot transform woman; 
and she will not step out of her Shakspearean 
self. On the figured coast of his page her 
Essence stands, as yet without the right of 
suffrage, limited to household cares, or raised 
to queenly ones; as learned as Portia can be- 
come, but not yet admitted to the profession 
which she mimicked ; provided for by the vari- 
ous dexterities of man, and still undriven by 
the modern threat of starvation into risking 
a single quality that is her birthright. There 
she stands : the modern world, stooping at her 
feet, will have to yield some of the reputed 
exclusiveness of men, but only such traits of 
it as Imogen, Cordelia, Beatrice, Portia, will 
select. In all this complicated period of over- 
crowded cities, over -stimulated competition, 
vices overfed, employees over-purse-proud, and 
politicians over-careless, there is no strait cruel 
enough to compel the essential woman to choose 
a career which would have unsexed one of 
Shakspeare's plays. I have no fear. Stand 
aside: cease that frantic bracing of the mas- 
culine back against so many doors of proscrip- 
tion. Throw them wide open, and let Shaks- 
peare's stately crowd pass up and down to scan 



240 The Perfect Woman. 

the vista through them. Come, patient, chaste, 
obedient, high-spirited Imogen, too docile Ophe- 
lia, frank Perdita, warm Julia, bright and witty 
Beatrice, whose tongue is a pen already, or the 
etcher's tool; come, thou accomplished, grave, 
acute and self-possessed Portia ; thou unsophis- 
ticated Miranda, who would fain share thy 
lover's toil ; thou shifty, prompt Maria, hater 
of humbug; thou tender Yiola — come, choose 
how many of these men's garments you will 
continue to wear, preferring to be women. 
Not one of them, I venture to declare, which 
your eternal instinct will feel to cramp or to 
disguise the form. ' Dost thou think,' says 
Kosalind, ' though I am caparison'd like a man, 
I have a doublet and hose in my disposition V ' 
— Rev. Johj* Weiss (" Shakspeare's Women "). 
" God is perfect in proportion as he comes 
down, not as he remains above"; and so will 
it be with the " perfect woman." She will 
have climbed to the heights of all the natural 
sciences, a knowledge of which is necessary in 
order that she may superintend her own do- 
mestic "sphere," and the more thoroughly she 
understands her business, the more ready will 
6he be to " come down " from theory to prac 



The Perfect Woman. 241 

tice. It is one thing for a pretty girl, radiant 
in white silk and roses and illusion, mounted 
on the rostrum before an audience in a fashion- 
able schoolroom on graduation day, to expound 
the theory of the conversion of starch into 
sugar, and to cover the blackboard with for- 
mulae which express the chemical changes which 
result from the mixing of flour and water and 
salt and yeast. She may go to the top of the 
"Bel Alp" with Prof. Tyndall and his twenty- 
five hermetically-sealed bottles of infusion of 
beef and turnips, and tell her audience all that 
Prof. Tyndall has told the world about " spon- 
taneous generation," in connection with the 
yeast which is mixed with the flour and the 
water; and, by reason of her ability to do this, 
she may be marked " perfect " in the school 
rank-book ; but unless she can " come down " 
from the rostrum to the kitchen, in a clean 
calico dress, and prove her theories by making 
some "perfect" bread, she is far from "per- 
fect" herself. 

The health of her entire " household," when 
she gets one, will depend upon her ability to 
"come clown" to the minutest details of kitchen, 
laundry and nursery life. She may be so cir- 



242 The Perfect Woman. 

cumstanced thart she need only superintend the 
work in these various departments of her 
"sphere"; but no one can superintend who 
has not first learned to execute. The quality 
of her bread and the physique of her children 
are the points whereon the reputation of the 
u perfect woman " rests for its support. If the 
bread and the children are poor and miserable 
and " slack-baked," they but reflect the same 
qualities from her who stamps her character 
on them. Jerry Cruncher, bear that he is, is 
yet on the truth's side when he grumbles at 
Mrs. Cruncher: "With your flying in the face 
of your own wittles and drink ! . . . . Look at 
your boy : he's as thin as a lath. Do you call 
yourself a mother, and not know that a moth- 
er's first duty is to blow her boy out?" 

And so our fair graduate upon the rostrum 
may read her well-rounded dissertation upon 
the " Duties of Home," but unless she has 
acquainted herself with all those details of 
anatomy, physiology and hygiene which every 
woman must know before she can " blow her 
boy out" into a model man, she comes far 
short of " the perfect woman." She cannot, in 
justice to herself, nor to the children she is to 



The Perfect Woman. 243 

bear, omit the practical reading of that book 
" in which all her members are written " — the 
book of life. This should be read till its les- 
sons stand out in letters of light, and with the 
assurance that, if disobeyed, they will turn to 
letters of fire ! But she can never study this 
book of books by simply reading about it in 
printed books. 

"Printed books," says the German, "are 
the spectacles through which the world is seen : 
good for weak eyes, it is true, but a free look 
at life keeps the eye healthier." 

The physician, who assumes to know how 
to assist nature out of morbid conditions, must 
devote himself or herself, with the utmost fidel- 
ity, to the study of anatomy and physiology, 
before he or she can presume to know anything 
about diseases. Shall the woman who is to 
bear children and to nurse them during the 
years of helpless infancy be limited to a few 
printed books for the acquisition of the knowl- 
edge requisite for filling her " sphere," and 
never go to the dissecting-room -to read nature's 
most impressive lessons ? No J " The perfect 
woman " will know the anatomy of her body 
go well that she will respect it beyond all 



244- The Perfect Woman. 

possibility of abusing it, and so will she be 
fitted to bear and to rear the perfect man 
whom the world will be obliged to wait for 
till "the perfect woman" comes to bear him. 
These, then, form the essential sciences 
necessary for the accomplishment of 

"A perfect woman, nobly planned." 

Nor can she dispense with a knowledge of 
literature, of history, and of the fine arts. 
There must be beauty in the " new household," 
and the " perfect woman" will know the differ- 
ence between a highly - colored chromo of a 
long woman, in a long blue dress, clinging to 
a cross on a rock in mid-ocean, and a photo- 
graph of the " Sistine Madonna " ; and her 
home will testify to this knowledge. 

"A little music, too, we want. 
In heaven the angels sing." 

In the present uncertainty concerning "the 
music of the future," it is safe to say that she 
will prefer the music of Beethoven and Men- 
delssohn to that of more modern composers. 

For forms of beauty in vases and all those 
accessories to a beautiful home where the chil- 
dren will be so happy that they would rather 



The Perfect Woman. 245 

be there than anywhere else, she will hardly 
be content with highly-colored paper mockeries 
of birds and butterflies and flowers gummed 
upon drain - pipes ; for the photographer will 
have shown her what Greece and Rome have 
given us for beauty, where she cannot go to 
Greece and Rome to see for herself, and she 
will choose accordingly; while the children 
will be so guided by her in the study of nature 
that they will raise their own real butterflies 
and make their own collections of " sermons 
in stones," which will so occupy their minds 
that sermons for misdeeds will be unknown to 
them. There is no surer way of keeping boys 
and girls "in the way they should go" than by 
interesting them in the study of nature. " Noth- 
ing is beautiful but that which is true," and 
nothing is so true as nature. 

Such are the main requisitions for your 
education as women. 

" Women are by nature intended for people 
of business : they are called to it by the equal 
balance of their powers and their keen sense 
of observation. Children require an ever-open 
eye, but not an ever-open mouth ; claude os, 
aperi oculos. But what circle of talking, which 



246 The Perfect Woman. 

always incloses only small and trifling relations, 
could so well exercise that ever-present glance 
as the circle of domestic affairs ? Boys des- 
tined for certain occupations — to be artists, 
professors, or mathematicians — may dispense 
with a capacity for business, but never a girl 
who will marry — especially one of the above- 
mentioned boys. . . .If, now, a girl is intended 
to grow up with a clear eye for everything 
around her; if she is not to waste her many 
eyes in company, as Argus did his, by mis- 
placing them, as painted eyes in a peacock's 
tail ; or if she is hot, like that sea-fish, the tur- 
bot, to have two eyes on the right side, but, 
in compensation, to bj blind on the left — let 
her be many-sideclly exercised in household 
affairs ; and the parents must not be disturbed 
if some admirer of an ethereal bride should 
object to her, as Plato reproached Eudoxus, 
with having profaned pure mathematics by ap- 
plying them to mechanics ; for to-day or to- 
morrow the wedding comes, and the husband, 
the honeymoon being past, kisses the mother's 
hand for all that the daughter does contrary 
to his expectation." — Jean Paul Fr. Kichtfr 
("Levana"). 



The Perfect Woman. 247 

The time required for fitting yourself for 
this " business woman " for which Nature in- 
tends you is nothing less than your first twenty- 
five years of life. Tour body does not acquire 
its full development in less than that time; 
much less do your powers of judgment attain 
their maturity. The great underlying cause of 
the painfully large majority of raismarriages 
and divorces which disgrace American life is 
to be found in the fact that our girls marry 
too young and on too short acquaintance. 
Some one has wisely said that " instead of 
making divorces more easy, we need to make 
marriages more difficult." No woman under 
twenty-five can assume the anxieties and re- 
sponsibilities of the home and the nursery with- 
out a premature renouncing of the free and 
joyous life of a glad and buoyant girlhood. 
"Rejoice," O young woman, "in thy youth, 
and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy 
youth." 

Even by so much as you are raised above 
the fish by being a warm-blooded creature with 
a diaphragm, by so much are you entitled to 
exercise that diaphragm freely by laughing 
along your first twenty-five years. 



248 The Perfect Woman. 

Says Jean Paul, also in " Levana " : "I 
could write a whole paragraph merely in favor 
of cheerfulness and merriment in girls, and 
dedicate it to mothers, who so frequently for- 
bid them. But seriously to assure girls they 
may laugh on suitable occasions would look 
very much like presenting them an opportunity 
of doing so. Mothers have much a habit of 
grumbling, even though they may smile in- 
wardly; the daughters, on the contrary, gen- 
erally only laugh visibly. The former have 
passed out of the triumphant church of virgins 
into the church militant of matrons; their grow- 
ing duties have increased their seriousness ; the 
bridegroom is changed from a honey bird, who 
invited them to the sweets of the honeymoon, 
into a resolute honey-hunting bear, who will 
himself have the honey." 

My final word is to you of " the triumph- 
ant church of virgins" who, like my little 
Daisy, of whom I told you in the previous 
chapter, will decide to have "the best, or none." 
Cheap husbands, like other cheap things, are 
always plenty, but good ones are scarce, and 
so it will be " none " for many of you. 

The world has plenty of work for you, as 



The Perfect Woman. 24.9 

single women, after you have fitted yourselves 
to be perfect women. Nor is it a joyless work. 
Far, very far from it ! If it be " more blessed 
to give than to receive," then, indeed, are you 
blessed among women by reason of the joy 
which you can give in ways in which that sis= 
ter walked of whom Whittier sings : 

"Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer 
And voice in dreams I see and hear — 
The sweetest woman ever Fate 
Perverse denied a household mate; 
Who, lonely, homeless, not the less 
Found peace in love's unselfishness, 
And welcome wheresoe'er she went; 
A calm and gracious element, 
Whose presence seemed the sweet income 
And womanly atmosphere of home — 
Called up her girlhood memories, 
The huskings and the apple-bees, 
The sleigh-rides and the summer sails, 
Weaving through all the poor details 
And homespun warp of circumstance 
A golden woof-thread of romance. 
For well she kept her genial mood 
And simple faith of maidenhood; 
Before her still a cloud-land lay, 
The mirage loomed across her way; 
The morning dew, that dries so soon 
With others, glistened at her noon; 
Through years of toil and soil and care. 



250 The Perfect Woman. 

From g'ussy tress to thin, gray hair, 

All unprofaned she held apart 

The virgin fancies of her heart. 

Be shame to him of woman born 

Who hath for snch but thought of scorn." 

And bo may each of you find 

"peace in love's unselfishness," 

in many ways which I might detail; but as a 
teacher of physiology, it remains for me only 
to point you in the ways where Nature has 
put you by the unalterable decree of sex. The 
first of these ways, after that of the mother, is 
the teacher, and for this profession you need 
all the preparation which the mother needs, 
and even more, for you will have not only to 
supplement her work, but also to amend it in 
many ways where hers will be defective. 

For this work you will need to fit yourself 
with the same fidelity with which your brother 
must fit himself for his profession ; and when 
he goes to the Technological Institute to learn 
to be an engineer, you will go to the Normal 
School to learn to be a teacher. Do not, I 
pray you, offer yourself as a guide for other 
people's children without this preparation. If 
you do, you put yourself in the ranks of those 



The Perfect Woman. 251 

who hang out a doctor's sign without ever 
having' made a study of the profession of medi- 
cine. Would you call a man to repair your 
water-pipes who had never studied plumbing ? 
Would you ask a man to build you a house 
who has made no study of architecture \ Will 
you trust your " house not made with hands " 
to a man or a woman who has never seen the 
inside of a human body, but who professes to 
be gifted with a supernatural " clairvoyance " 
which can dispense with all educational advan- 
tages and enable its possessor to step from the 
blacksmith shop and the herb-tea factory into 
the presence of death, with power to avert the 
dread monster's sway ? 

Will you assume that you can mould the 
plastic mind of a little child unaided by a love 
which is greater than mother-love — the love of 
a profession which calls for most faithful and 
accurate preparation ? 

The third place which belongs to woman 
by physiological decree is the sick-room ; and 
even as she needs to be educated in all the 
ways I have indicated in order that she may 
meet the requirements of the first two of her 
physiologically-decreed " spheres," even more 



252 The Perfect W< 



oman. 



emphatically does she need the education which 
the Medical College alone can give, if she as- 
sumes to cope with disease. 

Mother, Teacher, Nurse, Doctor: either or all 
of these you may become, because you are wo- 
men. For anything more — "What shall a Por- 
tia undertake to do ? That which is level to 
Portia's capacity. Must she do it ? That is as 
she herself may decide. But we let our women 
do the dirty drudgery of kitchens, expose them- 
selves to the publicity of saloons, grow sallow 
and stooping over spindles, and spend all day 
dodging poverty behind a counter. We pay our 
money to see them exercise their various talents 
on the stage, where no exigency of ' the plot 
surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappro- 
priate, no want of it is amazing. Oh, we gen- 
tlemen are such sticklers for propriety, so in- 
terested to keep our women well sequestered ! 
She must not speak in public, but she may 
sing. Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look 
indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is" an outrage ot 
our modesty ! Where will you draw a line 
through the crowd of competent intelligences ? 
1 would draw it very quickly by putting clever- 
ness in the place of dullness, though many a 



The Perfect Woman. 253 

preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lect- 
urer, would have to budge. Why should infe- 
riority in a swallow-tail be so valued and pro- 
tected against superiority in skirts ? Napoleon 
said, 'Careers are open to talents'; but he 
dreaded lively and gifted women, and got them 
out of the country, wisely suspecting that their 
insight would fathom his weakness. But no 
country can flourish till the talents and morals 
of women mix with its affairs. I cannot see 
why dullness is more respectable in a man than 
in a woman. . . .Portia is quite competent to 
lead a single life, and might earn a brilliant 
living if fate stripped her of wealth. Being 
without a particle of ambition, she would have 
to be driven by poverty into setting up house- 
keeping with her gifts. But no woman is fine 
enough to persuade Nature tu grant her ex- 
emption from the pain of love. There will 
always be exceptions — an Olympia Morata, a 
Cassandra Fedele, Florence Nightingale, Harriet 
Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara Barton — na- 
tures of great constancy, who are absorbed in 
scholarship, poesy, or good works, with a tem- 
perament that has an even graciousness toward 
all men, and just pauses short of honoring one 



254 The Perfect Woman. 

exclusively. Or, perhaps, the genius of such 
women was the gradual rally of time around 
an early disappointment, whose story never will 
be told ; when something baffled a first love— 
as the pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign 
substance that has intruded into its retreat, 
slowly coats it all over with nacre, till beauty 
incorporates the secret ill. Man covets it, but 
can never fix the date when the trouble of a 
fine soul began to revenge itself so nobly." — 
Jofjs- Weiss ("Portia"). 

A final word to you, my dear girls of the 
Framingham Normal School, who have been 
oftenest in my thoughts while I have been writ- 
ing these pages. Standing, as I do, in the rela- 
tion of an older sister, who went out from this 
our Alma Mater s fostering care before any of 
you saw the light of life, it is with an almost 
maternal solicitude that I watch you from day 
to day and long to guard you from those sad 
consequences which I too well know must befall 
you if you neglect and abuse that body which 
is " the coat of mail and breastplate of the 
soul." 

You can do and become all things which 
may become a " perfect woman " if you will but 



The Perfect Woman. 255 

learn, in the days of your youth, that all sick- 
ness and all suffering are the inevitable penalties 
of disobedience. " Be ye therefore perfect, even 
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect " ; 
and as an example of what a single woman may 
become who makes this command the rule of 
her life, I can do no better than to point you 
to the beautiful presence whose judicious and 
loving care makes your school-life a daily proof 
that a woman can become as efficient, and yet 
as womanly, as a Principal of a Normal School 
as she can in the Home. 



INDEX. 

A. 

A bad habit. ......... Page 10? 

About wells and typhoid fever 219 

About bangles 19 

About the husband 200 

About people who use their muscles well 120 

A criticism by Socrates 105 

Activity and oxygen 130 

Adam Clark's burnt-offering to the devil 40 

A little more from Solomon 234 

A little boy's philosophy 223 

A look beyond the orange blossoms 205 

Anointing of Juno and Venus 153 

An emperor's humor 154 

A pernicious fashion 106 

A remark from Jean Paul Bichter 237 

A sunny house 217 

A sensitive man 208 

A sermon from the woodchuck 216 

A sick simpleton * 118 

Aspasia and Cleone. 190 

A twenty-eight mile viaduct 151 

A Western lawyer's advice ,.,,,,,,,,,,,,,, .1C5 

B. 

Bands that are forbidden , 63 

Beautiful Greeks 87 

Beauty and behavior. 169 



258 Index. 

Best brain food Page 101 

Best hours for sleep 128 

Blossom and fruit 136 

Brain and nerves , 97 

C. 

Carlyle on clothes 171 

Causes of disease 142 

Castles in the air , 209 

Charmides and Minerva 34 

Cheap husbands 248 

Cleanliness 122 

Clothing the feet 183 

Close-fitting undergarments 180 

Complementary colors 186 

Corsets 182 

D. 

Dirt, debt, and the devil 157 

Diseases of women 143 

Doctors and women 174 

Doughnuts 46 

Dress reform, , , , , , 175 

E. 

Ear-rings and bangles 189 

Emerson on Beauty .150 

Epimeda's vow 192 

Epidemics of the Middle Ages - 158 

F. 

Faded carpets or faded faces 93 

Final words 255 

First corset 188 

Freckles and moth-patches 167 

Functions of the skin , , 152 

G. 
Golden child 163 

Graham gems 52 

H. 

Heart and Cupid 54 

Her Majesty's shoemaker 21 

House of four stories 146 



Index. 259 

How to drink, and what Page 38 

How we breathe 68 

How we ought not to breathe 70 

How plants and animals are perpetuated 134 

How to boil potatoes. 50 

How women kill themselves 8 

How to become beautiful 146 

How to be handsome old women 64 

How the star-fishes do it 82 

Horses, dogs, and orators 90 

Hygiene of the skin 156 

I. 
Introductory 5 

'J. 

Jean Paul Richter's view of woman 245 

Jerry Cruncher's grumbling 242 

John Quincy Adams' habit 156 

Joel Benton on Apples. 6 47 

Juno and the turtle 15 

K. 
Know thyself 26 

L. 
Life of the protozoas 29 

M. 

Mate and the home 199 

" Mince-pie "-ty 51 

Moist and sweaty feet 66 

Modern troglodytes 96 

More about respiration 72 

Morning bath 162 

Morning wrapper 196 

Most unhappy woman in the world 236 

Mr. Dick's prescription for little Davy 161 

Music of the voice 75 

N. 
Nature's sermon 94 

Nerves and nervousness 113 

O. 

Obeying Nature's laws 145 



260 Index. 

Olympia Morata, Cassandra Fedele, Florence 
Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria 

Mitchell, Clara Barton Page 253 

P. 

Pain of a new idea 176 

Perversion of the sewing-machine 214 

Phosphorus and matches 13 

Platonic definitions 26 

Poetry of dress* 181 

Pork as a diet 62 

Prayer of the nerves 116 

Pretty schoolgirl and the kitchen 241 

Pure water 218 

S. 

Self-control 206 

Self-development 226 

Shadows on the wall . . .108 

Shakspeare's women 239 

Shawls and muffs 194 

Sickly Eves 6 

Socrates' story of the grasshopper 84 

Solomon's ideal 229 

Street-sweeping 132 

" Sublata causa, cessat effectus" 92 

Successor of the chemise 177 

T. 

The apple and its companions 61 

" The best, or none ! " 201 

The cuckoo's nest 211 

The future undergarment 173 

The perfect woman 225 

The perfect woman esthetically considered. .244 

The unforgetful photograph 110 

Time to marry . 247 

Tri-cuspid gates. 58 

Twenty-five years of laughter .247 

Two idiots. 202 

Two kinds of women 228 

Two nervous systems 99 



Index. 261 

U. 

Useless clothing Page 213 

y. 

Veiled enchantress Ill 

Voltaire's miracle 118 

W. 

What the perfect woman will know 283 

What dress reform aims at 179 

What will make the hair grow 168 

What Napoleon said 253 

What to eat, and how to cook it 42 

What Dr. Edward Clarke said 231 

What causes cold feet 66 

What Dr. Johnson asked his physician 127 

What causes varicose veins 64 

What a Portia shall undertake 252 

What is good for pimples. 164 

What woman's education should be 238 

What Thackeray said 78 

What the Church of Rome does 126 

What Plato said 10 

What marriage requires 207 

What causes palpitation 65 

What Horace Mann said 139 

Whittier's dear aunt 249 

Why girls faint 188 

Why the Greenlanders eat candles 45 

Woman's place 251 

Women of Skakspeare , .123 









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